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Notes to the Granddaughters
From a different blog -- for the granddaughters.
When asked, my wife, May, said her moveable feast would have been when she was with her family as a child in Japan. Her dad, US Army enlisted, was assigned to Japan when my wife was eight years old; they were there for two years at a small Army camp. My wife remembers that as the happiest time in her mother's life. Her mother, Japanese, was a war bride after WWII, during the Korean War, when she married my wife's Hispanic father. She was Buddhist; he was Catholic.
She was 18 when they got married, move to the United States, but a few years later were reassigned to Japan, her home country.
While in Japan, they lived in the nicest house they had ever lived in (one needs to remember my father-in-law's enlisted rank in the US Army at that time) -- a two-story duplex. May's mother would take the both of them to get their hair and nails done at the local beauty shop. They had a maid, Todosan who always burned the pancakes which my mother loved: crispy, "burned" pancakes. My wife remembers taking walks along the "water" which she thinks was the ocean (or more accurately the harbor), because of the cliffs, and not a river.
The general area of Kure, southeast of Hiroshima:
My wife remembers Camp Kure being in the Japanese town of Nijimura but yet one cannot find it on the map. In addition, there are very few google hits regarding the city of Nijimura, but it does exist. It appears to have been swallowed up by Kure.
At wiki: Kure was the home base of the largest battleship ever built, the Yamato. One of the bases of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) is still located there, its former center became the JMSDF Regional Kure District. In addition to a hospital for the Marine Self Defense Force, there was also the Escort Flotilla (destroyers), Submarine Flotilla and the Training Squadron in the Kure District. A museum with a 1:10 scale model of the Yamato is located in the city.
