The roots on my father's side of the family are Cajun. The Dozier families were Huguenots who fled France during the French Revolution and who eventually landed in Florida, probably from Acadia,which is now known as Nova Scotia. Some Doziers stayed in Florida and intermarried with the locals including the Seminoles, but most made their way to the Louisiana territory where most of the French immigrants ended up, as it was land claimed by the Frenchies (Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed the entire Mississippi watershed for France in 1682) for King Louis XIV. These French Americans came to be known as Cajuns which is a moniker derived from the name Acadia.

There aren't many people with this surname living in nothern parts of the U.S., most stayed in the south. Many people in the U.S. mistakenly believe most Cajuns reside in New Orleans but in fact few ever lived there or live there now. Most moved to other places in Louisiana including Baton Rouge, Lafayette, Bossier City, etc. Cajun cuisine is actually a fusion of many including influences from the Caribbean and Central America but things like deep-fried turkey and crayfish (or crawfish, we Okies call them crawdads) etoufée are original Cajun creations.

There is a Dozier, Alabama and a town in northwestern Texas called Dozier. Our direct descendants went from Louisiana into, reasons unknown, Arkansas, where my great-great-great-great (?) grandfather had a plantation and allegedly slaves. A lot of my father's relatives are from the northwest town of Waldron. My grandfather migrated further west into Oklahoma during the Great Depression and worked on WPA projects as a civil engineer, including the major roads around Broken Bow Lake, the area in which he eventually resided and perished. My own father settled in Tulsa after landing a job at American Airlines.

My mother's relatives, the Yamamotos, the Kandas, and others hail from the boondock town of Akuura just outside Okayama City (has since been incorporated into the city)which is situated between Kobe and Hiroshima and is the gateway to Shikoku and home of the world's largest suspension bridge, the Seto Ohashi.

My Japanese grandmother, Sugako, was a bullheaded woman, i.e., one that would not put up with a lot of hanky panky from her former husbands. My Japanese grandfather, Yoshizo Aoyanagi, came home once with a "geisha," i.e., the cheap type which gave it all up, drunk out of his wits and laughing incessantly when my mom was very young. He did it a second time after she forgave the first incident but she kicked him out of the house for good after that and he died after remarrying, a somewhat wealthy man. Grandma Sugako raised my mom alone until she remarried to another nice guy with whom she had another daughter, my mom's half-sister, Hisako. She divorced this man after only a few years and my mom was raised by her mom while Hisako was raised by her father. Sugako Yamamoto lived almost to the age of 94 and was a pack-a-day smoker and would have easily lived to 100, as she was in perfect health, but died after falling and bumping her head. She was a very commited Buddhist and prayed every day and advised against drinking anything too hot or too cold and always drank a large amount of ocha (green tea) every day. The only other thing she had ever consumed cool was water.

My mom Ichie is quite tall for her generation and led her high school team, Sanyo Gakuen to the All-Japan volleyball championship in Tokyo where they lost in the finals. At 5'4" she towered over her teammates, although one (and also a blocker) was in that 5'4" ~ 5'5" range; however ladies in that generation rarely got over 5' tall in Japan! My mom was also a member of the basketball team, which is also quite rare in Japan as students rarely if ever are allowed to play more than one sport, as they practice the one sport year-round.

My mom married a Japanese man, Rikiya Tsujino (dec.), who was a movie director, and had three children, all born in "Shinkyo", Manchuria, the part of China Japan colonized before and during "The Big One," WWII. To make a long story short her two daughters died soon after their return to Japan, after Japan lost the war. One daughter most likely contracted tuberculosis at a POW camp in Korea and died 6 months later. Once while my mom visited Okayama to get food for the family, they were living with Tsujino's family at the time in Kyoto where he hailed, the other daughter had mysteriously passed away. This incident deeply scarred my mother and broke her heart. One can imagine losing one child, losing two was devastating. Koichiro Tsujino is my oldest "brother," and is the baby from mom's first marriage. Unfortunately for him his father left my mom for another woman with whom he was having an affair with, a bit actress and put my mom out. He grew up without having a father or mother influence in his life, being raised principally by a nanny...

Traditionally in Japan women who were divorced from their husbands got little to nothing, and it's still not much better for women to this day, and my mom did not have the means to raise her son. She had to go to work to provide for herself and hopefully to find some happiness in this oft-times cruel world. You can imagine a person who faced such advertsity could have easily "packed it in" and gave up on life. But my mom is one of the strongest minded people I've ever met. She perserved and eventually landed in the Tokyo metro working as the bar "mama" of a place near Tachikawa Air Force Base (land reverted to Japan in the early 1960s), a bar which by chance my father had started to frequent.

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