Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Joe Yasutake Interview
Narrator: Joe Yasutake
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 9, 2002
Densho ID: denshovh-yjoe-01-0009

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AI: Well, and then your father, you were saying, received this offer of a job in Chicago.

JY: Uh-huh.

AI: And so you moved there in 1947, was it?

JY: 19-, that's right, in 1947. Yeah, I, I can remember when he got the job offer, and of course he was elated and decided that we would go, and he told the, the, Mr. and Mrs. Cole, who were their employee, employers, and they were devastated. You know, they didn't want to lose my mom and dad, and so they started to offer them more money and more time off and all kinds of things. And I can recall my dad -- this was the first time I ever heard him say anything, you know, derogatory -- not derogatory, but just kind of against them when he was saying, in Japanese I remember him saying, "What do they think, that I like this job?" [Laughs] You know? He couldn't believe that they thought that if he would, if they would offer him more money that he would stay here and so forth. So of course we did, we did go to Chicago.

And they, they sent me off to a, a summer camp during the year that -- well, during the time they were moving from Cincinnati to Chicago I went to a summer camp in Michigan for the summer while they made the move, so when I came back from the summer camp they had already moved into, into Chicago and he was in place working at the Chicago Resettlers Committee. So that was much more of a job in line with my dad's background and just the kind of talents he had. So the first, the first school I went to actually in Cincinnati, or in Chicago, was pretty -- you know, his office -- we lived in the building. We lived in Resettlers Committee office for the first month, month or so while he was finding, trying to find a place to live and so forth, and so it was in a pretty rough neighborhood. And I went to school, and it was Wells High School in Chicago, and it was, it was a pretty tough neighborhood. I mean, I was, you know, I was kind of concerned about going there every day, but nothing happened. It just, it just seemed very, very hostile to me.

But I was fortunate I was only there for about a month, and then my, my dad bought this house in south Chicago and so we moved down there. And it was at that time that we finally kind of resettled, you know, from -- and got back to a more normalized life. And initially it was just my dad and my mother and I, and then my sister came back from New York and started going to the University of Chicago, and so she lived with us. And then my oldest brother Mike finished at Boston and went to Seabury-Western, which is a seminary for Episcopalians in Evanston. So although he was living in Evanston, of course he came home quite often. So, and then my brother Tosh was the only one who came out to Seattle, so he was the only one that was kind of away from the family. But he would come in on, in summers and so forth, so it was the first time that the whole family got together again in a, in a normal kind of a, environment. And those were, those were pretty good days, too, actually.

AI: And those were your high school years then?

JY: Yes.

AI: In Chicago.

JY: That's right. So finally, you know, from the fourth grade through the, even my freshman year, because I changed schools again although I lived in the same place, I had to switch schools every single year. And so it was the first time in Chicago that I was able to go to one school from the time I was a sophomore, you know, until I graduated. So that kind of had a stabilizing effect I think, too, to finally be there. And there were a few Niseis at that school, but somehow I didn't connect with them. It's not that, it's not that -- I don't think -- [laughs] -- that it was that I was trying to avoid the Japanese or anything like that. I just don't consciously remember thinking that way. But somehow my, I started swimming. Since I got cut from the baseball team, I thought I'd try somethin' else, so I started swimming. And so my -- and there were no other Nisei kids on the swim team, and so my circle -- and swimming is kind of a sport where you kind of start associating with your teammates and stuff all the time, and so all my friends were Caucasian friends. And although, you know, my dad's world was around trying to help people who were coming out of camps to find jobs and homes and, you know, to create a social life for them and so forth, so I was exposed to, you know, to events like that, my, my world at school was pretty much all white. And I really can't even to this day, when I think back on it, I can't figure out why that was, since there were Nisei kids around.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.