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T: The priest there was Ogatu-san, who was studied at the University of Chicago, or was teaching on related religion. So he took a lot of foreigners in... so my sister and I stayed there. We stayed at the YMCA but I really wanted to stay at the monastery.

The winter was just dreadful, because of the cold, and we weren't prepared. It was warmer outside than inside. It was very cold in the temple. But we probably stayed there for about a month.

And you know we did a lot of -- we read the sutra in the morning, chanted. We didn't know what we were chanting, so I asked the priest, what are we saying. He said he didn't know. He just took it. Zen. I said, "Oh, what kind of guy is this".

D: Did that bother you, that you didn't know?

T: Yes and no.
I think that --  the best thing about our staying at the Zen temple was not our -- it was kind of a pseudo-interest in some ways, because we thought we'd like to know, but how could we know Zen, study Zen in the short time?
But one realization we had at the time was that our mother was -- my sister and I discussed this -- she was living the life of Zen.

D: Your mother was? That's interesting.

T: Raising children and the way she lived.

D: She was working every day.

T: Working, but the way she did things, she was living the life of Zen. She told us to come home. "What are you stupid girls doing at that temple?" That's how she felt. You silly girls. Come home and learn how to sew, or something. But basically she was living the life of Zen. We realized that, that was the biggest revelation that we had. And I think the happened.
We travelled with her for a month, we gave her a hard time, because we wanted to. But I think she enjoyed our being that way.

D: Was she from Japan, your mother?

T: Yes, she was from the southern part of Japan, from Okinawa. We visited her relatives, we were there for probably a month. But then we came back, and stayed in central Japan, in Kyoto and Tokyo mostly.

D: And your mother went home then?

T: She went back to Hawaii. And she used to send us money once in