YOSHIKO STYNES
Yoshiko Stynes met her husband David in Tokyo in 1962. Five years later they came to Australia to start a new life. Today, she is the mother of four including radio personality Yumi Stynes, and here shares insight into her own childhood, showing granddaughters, Anouk, 20, Dee Dee, 17, and Mercy, 7, just how different it was to theirs... and why she’ll never forget it.
Dear Anouk, Dee Dee and Mercy,
On Mother’s Day, I think of my mother.
Your great-grandmother Chiyo was one of the first women to graduate from the University of Japan. She studied home economics in the early 1900s.
At the time, it was so rare and unique for women to have such a high degree of education that people expected a lot from her. They assumed she would be brilliant at any kind of cooking, sewing and producing foods. But her degree taught her knowledge and literature, not skill!
Chiyo experienced World War I as a young girl and World War II as a mother looking after her six children.
My mother was good at cooking with whatever she had. We had little food. I remember we had miso soup with potatoes because that was all she had. We always had to queue to get supplies. The government provided one ticket per family, that we exchanged for a limited amount of food. There was always a shortage of clothes and food because of the war.
I was born two years before WWII ended. My memories are of always being hungry as there wasn’t enough food,
though it wasn’t only my family, the whole country was hungry.
I remember Chiyo used to hop on an overcrowded train at least once a week, travelling from Tokyo to a small country town called Nagano where she had grown up and a few cousins of hers lived. It was cold. Very cold!
It took my mum six or seven hours to reach Nagano to get food from her farmer cousins to feed us starving children. She used to carry the food in a rucksack. Her cousins grew cabbage, potatoes, onions — simple food. They had basics and not much to spare but they would spare some for my mother and all of her kids.
When I think of my mother in her later years, she had a crippled body and was always in pain and I think it was that hard work, walking through the snow with a heavy backpack on her tiny body, wearing poor clothes and shoes. By the age of 60 she was bedridden with agonising pain.
She told us that not a grain of rice was to be wasted, that we should be grateful to the farmers who worked so hard in the rice fields to grow the grain of rice.
By the way your great-grandfather was a Buddhist priest who lived in a small temple on the outskirts of Tokyo. They were separated but I didn’t really know this and was not aware of my parents’ separation until I was six or seven.
My teenage sister Kyoko cared for me during this time, feeding and nurturing me and on Mother’s Day I still think of her as my second mum. We literally bathed in a barrel that had a fire under it.
Kyoko died last year but I couldn’t get to Japan for her funeral because of Covid. She reminds me that you don’t have to have had a baby to be like a mother to someone.
In Japan we didn’t celebrate Mother’s Day. The mother had to go out to work to earn money because the father was away. Mother’s Day was about everyday survival.
On Mother’s Day in Australia now I also think about my three daughters who are all mothers. Your mum, Yumi, is a very kind person like my mother.
My granddaughters, I hope you all have a lovely Mother’s Day with a small time in reflection, though you don’t actually have to celebrate on Mother’s Day. Mothers are mothers every day.
With much love, Yoshiko