The Empress of Japan

Ok so I am taking a family history class at school and byu allows its students to access paid websites for free! Ancestry.com is one of them. On ancestry.com you can search all kinds of information, one that particularly caught my attention was the immigration collections. I searched Seijiro Seiji on the immigration collections. I only found Yoshimi Seiji, my great-grandmother. Attached was the immigration PASSENGER LIST that showed she immigrated from Nigata to Hawaii. How cool! It even said that she came on the ship "Empress of Japan." However, something didn't look right. The passenger list showed my great Uncle Arnold traveling with her. Something was odd because it said the Arnold's birth place was Aiea Hawaii. I thought how could this be if this document is an immigration passenger list from Nigata. I showed it to my teacher and we came up with a few possibilites and reasons as to why this might be but i was still uneasy. I called grandma durrett, something i should have done in the first place haha! she told me everything. I quickly sent an unprofessional email to my teacher...

Brother Alford-

this is Alana Durrett I am the one who talked to you after class today about my great-grandmother (Yoshimi) who immigrated fromJapan on the empress of Japan. Well I called my grandmother (what i should have done before!)

Ok so i got the STORY.

she told me that they all lived in hawaii but that her grandmother...my great great granmother was sick in nigata so her dad seijiro my great grandfather sent Yoshimi and Arnold- the little boy that was listed on the passenger list back to nigata to take care of her. That list that i printed was the passenger list from that time!

Also my grandmother told me that her spoiled sister which is arnold's sister too Hideko begged her dad if she could go back to Japan and get a japanese education. My grandmother told me that they all went to normal schools in hawaii but that her one sister wanted to go back to japan and live there with her aunt to get a japanese education. Yoshimi had to send 10$ a month to her...thats a lot back then! Then when the japanese bombed pearl harbor, my grandmother them all wanted Hideko to come home to be with the family but Hideko didn't want to...i guess she felt partial to Japan. Finally years later my grandmother remembers going to pearl harbor with her family to greet Hideko back into Hawaii!

if this is confusing ill just tell you in class.

But i just thought that this was so neat...the best part was that she didn't know the name of that ship and when I told her it was the empress of japan she said it made her day and she wrote it down!

so cool, just thought Id share that with you.

Alana Durrett