I have one more disc of Season 1, A Place To Call Home; the evil Regina has shown up.
The Japanese visit was interesting. My mother's sister Ruth was engaged to a young man, Kelly Borders, when WW2 broke out. He was captured by the Japanese and lived through hell for four years. He was in the notorious Bataan Death March, and when he came back to the States, she foolishly married him, refusing to acknowledge his serious mental issues and emotional problems. In passing, he would occasionally tell us about living on rotting fish heads and wormy rice when we complained about something put on the table, but I will never know all of the horrors he went through.
He was always kind to us, but there were "whispers" among my mother's sisters; I remember during the McCarthy eras that he was reading things like "Truman and the Jews are destroying America," "Is your neighbor a Communists?," and other shit like that. Because of his emotional wounds, he was on government disability, and he had a menial job working in a foundry. My cousins grew up in real poverty. As he aged, a lot of things came to the surface and he came to despise my Aunt Ruth, the most artless and foolish of my mother's four sisters. Their last child, after two daughters, was a son, who suffered brain damage, and my uncle used him as a pawn against her: the boy grew up with a very ugly. violent misogynist attitude, and after my uncle's death, my aunt feared him and begged my mother and our family doctor to commit him. He was institutionalized for several years. Just after I moved to New York he was released against my Aunt Ruth's wishes and he moved back into her home. He was around 18, and his sisters who were in their late 20s or early 30s had moved away from home.
One morning, shortly before noon, my mother called to tell me that he had beaten my aunt with a Coke bottle, which led to her having a stroke. She literally crawled across the street to collapse in a neighbor's yard. When the emergency team arrived, my aunt begged them to let her die, and she died in the ambulance. When I called later in the day to see how things were going, Randy told me my mother was out in the car looking for my cousin. She had a gun and was going to kill him. That didn't happen, and my cousin since then has been in and out of institutions.
