No.8 - hcikeda jimdo ページ！

　　　　　　［No.8］My Roots and My Mother 2.25, 2013

　Soon it will be Easter (Mar. 31) and I will go to the church where my mother was active. After mass, we’ll go to her church grave and have worship. Usually we Japanese go to our family grave at the time of the spring equinox in accordance with Buddhism. Thinking of my mother’s life, it was eventful.

　My mother, Tatsuko, was born on Mar. 29 (Taisho 4), 1915, as the eldest daughter of Kenji and Kiku Sasaki in Taibei, Taiwan. Kenji was appointed as an English teacher at Taibei Junior High School. In Taiwan, they were committed to the teachings of Zen Buddhism and Zazen (meditation of Zen Buddhism). Therefore, my mother was named Tatsuko(達子), from the character of ‘Daishi (Dharma,達磨ダルマ大師)’. Kenji Sasaki was born in Kishiwada, Osaka in 1885 (Meiji 18) and graduated from Tokyo Foreign Language University with his great efforts and was appointed as an English teacher of 6a junior high school in Tsushima, Aichi Prefecture. He married Kiku Hotta, who was the eldest daughter of the priest of Tsushima shrine, Aichi. Soon Kenji and his family returned from Taiwan to Osaka and moved to Kobe, Nagasaki and Fukuoka for his job. Anyway my mother Tatsuko had graduated Fukuoka Women’s College and was dedicated to the mission school Wilmina in Osaka (name of the pre-war Osaka Jyogakuin High School). At 24 she married Kumao Ikeda, who was a steel company man in Manchuria, and left her school and went to Manchuria with her husband soon after marriage. Soon after, I was born in August 1940 in Kobe on my father’s training business trip to Kobe Steel Company. After the Pacific war, various things happened with my mother and we came back to Kobe in 1950 and she began to work again at Osaka Jogakuin. She brought up her 4 sons as my father was weak in health. She experienced many big happenings like the Great Hanshin Earthquake and others but she never got depressed by hardship.

　My mother ( died 2007, Sep. 3, age 92) was a strong woman like a Dharma doll which tips but doesn’t fall. In this season, I remember her clearly in my mind every year when Easter is approaching.

( *Tatsuko Ikeda 1915 Mar.29 〜 2007 Sep.3 )

　Dharma 達磨 http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%81%94%E7%A3%A8

　　　 Dharma だるま http://www.daruma.or.jp/about/daruma.html