Densho Digital Repository - Judy Furuichi Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-8-5)

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VY: Okay, so your parents are growing up and your father's in Southern California, your mom is in Alameda, then what happens, how did they meet?

JF: Well, actually, the story goes that when my mother was fourteen, when she did make that trip back to Japan in 1928, she met my dad in that same, in Hiroshima village. So they knew each other, which, I know, to me... and then they come back, my mother and my grandparents come back. And I think... well, it was not an arranged marriage, but just reading her biography, my mother, do you know what baishakunin is? So there was a couple here in Alameda that knew my dad's family and that knew a couple in Los Angeles. So they brought the two together and I guess the kind of, like, helped arranged the marriage, and that's it, that's how they... yeah.

VY: That's interesting, okay. And then do you know very much else about your grandparents on your father's side?

JF: Nothing.

VY: Okay.

JF: Nothing. We just have a photo of him when the day that, or very soon before he left, he took a photo with his mother, and that's the only photo we have of my father's family. My dad wasn't a very talkative man, so he didn't share a lot.

VY: Okay, and then let's see... so your parents meet and they get married. And what's their early life like, like between the time they get married in, say, the early 1940s, their prewar life, what do you know about that? Working, activities, that sort of thing?

JF: Gosh, I don't know. Good question, I don't know when my dad, they were married in 1941. Was it '41? Yes. And they were married in Alameda. My mother, by that time was very active at the Methodist church in Alameda. And so... you know, Virginia, that's a very good question. I don't know what they were doing prior to that. I know my mother did work after she graduated from high school. She worked for the Nichi Bei newspaper very early on. She told stories about having to go to San Francisco, and she, in those days, they did typesetting to publish their newspaper, and her job was to rake, as she would say, rake all the letters away, back, and then put them back in order so that they can be used again to typeset for the newspaper. So she did that for several years, went to San Francisco. But I know that in her younger days, she became very active in the Christian conference community that Japanese Americans formed amongst the different churches and became very active. So, yeah.