In January of this year, completely out of the blue, I received an invitation to an Ikehara Family Reunion. “What? Who is this guy?” was my immediate reaction, but in the same instant I realized that I knew the person who had sent the invitation, if only by last name (Shimabukuro was the married name of my father’s cousin, whom I had met as a child because she and her family lived in a nearby town).

My father was one of eight children, and I knew my aunts and uncles fairly well: Gus, Archie, Dot, Helen, Doris, Harriet, and Katherine (these are their English names). I had also met all 21 of my first cousins because many of them lived either on Kauai or in Honolulu. But my grandfather had a brother who also immigrated to Hawaii early in the 20th century, and it was this side of the family that was virtually unknown to me.

I hadn’t seen any of my Honolulu or California relatives in decades, and I knew I had never met most of my grandfather’s brother’s descendants, so I decided to attend. In fact, I was one of almost 60 people who travelled to Reno, Nevada, for the reunion activities scheduled on Friday and Saturday, June 15th and 16th.

On Friday evening, we gathered for a pupu party in the Mandalay Room of the Circus Circus Hotel. This was an informal event where we introduced ourselves to those we’d never met, or re-acquainted ourselves with family members we hadn’t seen in years. George also put together a slide show, with favorite photos contributed by everyone (the ones I chose are not exactly representative, but some of them depict significant events in the lives of my parents and siblings).

Saturday evening was the formal reunion dinner in the Bordeaux Room of the El Dorado Hotel. Although I’m still on a restricted diet due to a dental procedure last month, I discovered, much to my delight, that I could eat everything I wanted. And the food, including the desserts, was excellent! I brought my digital camera with me to this event, but it does not function well when it needs the flash, and the photos I took were uniformly bad. I discarded all but the three which I’ve posted below.

Mike Shironaka took this photo. I’m talking to my cousin Ann Mashita. She looks seriously concerned about something, but I remember us having a light-hearted conversation! Ann was there with her son Tony.
I took this photo of the younger children who attended. I’m listing their names as Ally, Hana, Samantha, Kai, and Alexia but I’m probably wrong about some or all of them.
My uncle Henry and Aunt Kikue, my father’s youngest sister, have been married for many many years. Ki was named by my parents as my guardian while I was attending a boarding high school in Honolulu.

So, who are we? In the first mailing, George had solicited basic genealogical information from everyone on the list of family members, and from the responses, he compiled our personal biographies into a family tree. This document is by no means finalized, but with additional historical research into people, places, and dates, we’re hoping eventually to have a fairly comprehensive record of our family’s history in the US.

When I first looked at the list of names we all received, I began to wonder how many of us, the descendants of the two brothers, there are. I learned that Kama was the older brother who emigrated from Okinawa to Hawaii in 1907, followed by his younger brother, my grandfather Gashin, who arrived in 1915. Kama had four children and my grandfather eight, as I mentioned earlier. Kama and Gashin are the Issei, the first generation of Americans. In Kama’s family, there are four children (two boys and two girls) counted in the second generation, fifteen (six boys and nine girls) in the third generation, eighteen (ten boys and eight girls) in the fourth generation, and one in the fifth generation (one girl). In Gashin’s family, there are eight children (three boys and five girls) in the second generation, twenty-four (fourteen boys and ten girls) in the third generation, twenty-two (twelve boys and ten girls) in the fourth generation, and three (one boy and two girls) in the fifth generation. The second generation are called the Nisei, the third the Sansei, the fourth the Yonsei, and the fifth, as I learned recently from Wikipedia, the Gosei.

Toward the end of the evening on Saturday, we had a group photograph taken, and when I receive my copy, I know it will become one of my treasures. Certainly, my vivid memories of this first Ikehara Family Reunion will not soon fade.

This post was written in early February 2007.

My 86-year-old mom, now recovering from surgery to repair a broken hip sustained in a recent fall, oscillates between senility and lucidity. Communicating with her has become very difficult, and we are often exasperated by her irrational behavior. The fact that neither my two sisters nor I was ever very close to her does not help the situation. As adults, we’ve tended to keep our distance because she often stated that she had not wanted children and certainly did not want the ones she got, which would be . . . us. Nevertheless, I believe that our mom did try to provide us with normal childhoods. For the record, this is what I remember.

She sent us to Japanese Language School so that we would have a greater understanding of our East Asian heritage. She was a Girl Scout troop leader, and all of us participated in these scouting programs from Brownies through Cadettes. Mom produced the weekly bulletin for our church; we went to Sunday School, sang in the church choir, and attended Pilgrim Fellowship. We went to church suppers and other such events. We belonged to the Kekaha Community Association: in the summer, we swam in the pool almost daily, and throughout the year enjoyed the carnivals, rodeos, and various holiday celebrations. Starting in the first grade, we all took piano lessons. In the summers, we studied ukulele and hula; we went horseback riding. There was swim team, band practice.

As far back as I can remember, she was a “Working Mom”: she was a vocational education teacher at the local high school and beloved by her many students. She taught typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, office practice, and general business and trained generations of office workers on our island. Whether she was a natural-born teacher or not, I don’t know, but she taught us children how to type and also how to drive, surely two of the most useful skills for life in late 20th century America.

Mom took us bowling on Saturday mornings. She taught us badminton and croquet, which we often played as a family after supper. Like all the wives and mothers in the 50s, she ran the household — shopping and cooking and cleaning and taking care of our numerous pets — the cats, parakeets, fish, turtles, rabbits, chickens, and even the stray dog or two. She planned our birthday parties and showered us with gifts on Christmas, and there was always a treat even for the more obscure holidays like Girls’ Day.

Mom was also a knitter and embroiderer. Even now, when I happen to glance into my linen closet, I’m amazed at what she did: she started hope chests for us when we were in elementary school. We all have handmade mittens, socks, scarves, and sweaters; we have intricately embroidered tablecloths and napkins. How she found the time for this I really don’t know.

Mom was an indefatigable correspondent. To her father in Connecticut and to high school and college friends, she wrote pages and pages of single-spaced, typewritten prose on a weekly basis. Had we grown up with the Internet, Mom would have been among the first to be enthralled with the promise of this new epistolary mode.

Sometimes it seemed that Mom subscribed to every general interest periodical ever published, among them the Christian Science Monitor, Time, New Yorker, Holiday, Sunset, and National Geographic. And though she might have been months behind, she read them all.

Mom wanted us to experience the wider world beyond the horizon of our little island. For example, she masterminded our cross-country trip in 1964, which even now is the one opportunity I have had to see some of our country’s unique and most magnificent sights. She took us to the other Hawaiian islands; she sent us to Europe and the Orient.

I don’t know if she did all this because she wanted to or felt that she had to, but the fact remains, she did it. She was bad at parenting, but I give her credit for trying. In spite of her, I believe that I had a happy childhood.

Note: Photograph courtesy of Austin’s Uptown Studio, Sacramento CA, All rights reserved