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Born in 1899, Chiyo Ongino Matsumiya had only to close her eyes to return to Fukui, Japan. There, she could see her family plant rice by hand in long rows on terraced fields, hear her father beat drums during Obon festivals and watch him read and write letters for the illiterate.

With each memory, she'd say, "Things like that I can't forget."

Between 1885 and 1924, some 180,000 Japanese immigrants journeyed to America. At 16, Jinzaburo Matsumiya sought providence in this country's railroads, and by 1911 he had risen to the rank of section foreman. Seven years later, he traveled to Fukui to claim his bride, Chiyo, in omiai-kekkon, an arranged marriage settled between families.

"In those days, you obeyed your parents," Chiyo explained in papers stored at University of Utah's Marriott Library. "You had to say 'hai!' [yes]."

She was 18 and ready for Utah.

"My mother was an adventurer who easily replaced kimonos for Western dress," her daughter, Jeanne Konishi, 84, said last week while dealing out cards and lessons in the image-rich game of Hanafuda, or Flower Dance.

After two years spent farming, Matsumiya went back to work as section foreman in Tintic Junction. A remote crossroad between the mining towns of Silver City and Mammoth, it was also a way station for trains traveling between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.

Two freight cars placed parallel to one another, widened and roofed over, became the Matsumiyas' new home. Commodities were brought in by train, water stored in large tanks, bathing limited to once a week. Chiyo planted vegetable gardens. She raised chickens and pigs, stoked wood-fired stoves, washed clothes by hand, took in isolated, lonely Japanese workers during the Depression and spanned culinary cultures with Japanese rice and headcheese. The children took the bus to school in Eureka. At home, they had lessons in Japanese.

"My mother enjoyed Buddhist picnics in Salt Lake," said Jeanne, dealing a wisteria-faced card. "And since we had a piano, she invited Mormon parishioners to hold their services in our living room."

On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. War broke out. President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 usurped the rights of 120,000 Japanese Americans from California, Oregon and Washington, sending them to internment camps, including Utah's Topaz, where they were registered with numbers instead of surnames.

In Utah, police searched Japanese homes for shortwave radios, cameras, guns. "They opened drawers, cupboards, scattering everything to the floor," Jeanne said. "They took my father's shotguns, a .22 rifle. His Colt pistol was never returned."

In dead of winter, warm wastewater was diverted onto cold railroad tracks in Garfield and suspicion fell to the Japanese. Jinzaburo was fired and ordered to leave "town" within three days. Accused with no recourse, the Matsumiyas, like so many of their countrymen, bowed to silence.

Relocating to Eureka so their children could finish the school term, they went next to Payson looking at places to rent. "Even a barn would do," Chiyo said, "but we were told it wasn't for rent to 'Japs.' " They looked toward Salt Lake City.

"You couldn't buy a house east of Main Street, and it was difficult for Japanese to find work," Konishi said. Thirty years with America's railroad, her father became a dishwasher. Her mother, an expert seamstress, worked at a men's store. Their house, near 2100 South and West Temple, soon was populated with family, friends, boarders, and chickens. No one mentioned the war.

The way I see it, we play the hand we're dealt.

"No matter what we felt about the war, we didn't talk about it - not even with our kids," said Chiyo. "We had to live and eat as usual. We just kept our mouths shut."

In 1953, Chiyo became a U.S. citizen. She lived for three-quarters of a century in Utah, dying at 91. In Tintic Junction, a look back discerns fragments of a chawan from which the family once ate hot rice.