<Begin Segment 18>

MA: So you've lived in Spokane for...

KY: Sixty years.

MA: ...sixty years now.

KY: Sixty years.

MA: So you've seen it change quite a bit.

KY: Oh, definitely, oh, it's changed.

MA: What are some ways that you've seen it changing?

KY: Well, there's, I don't know what the population was back in the '40s, but it's, it's up quite a bit. And there's some parts in Spokane I don't even know. They give me the address, and I don't even know where it is anymore. Before, I used to know. If they gave me an address, I could just find the place. But now it's grown so much. But as far as industry, I don't see any big industries here in town. We don't have Boeing, we don't have big business, but people are coming in. They must have jobs someplace in town. But it is growing, Spokane's growing.

MA: What about the Japanese American community?

KY: It's growing, it's growing, but, you know, the Niseis are dying. I tell you, we had twenty deaths last year, twenty. There were (not all) Niseis, but we had, just among the Japanese community, we had twenty deaths. We just had Bosankai, which is our annual cemetery event that we do every year, and we honor all these people that passed away, and there was twenty people that passed away this past year, twenty. So it's, it's a pretty big community. I don't know, maybe Ed knows the census of the Japanese population, I don't know what it is, but it's quite large. And more and more young people are coming in. Of course, there's no older ones, but the professionals are coming in, and I notice there's several doctors in town.

MA: Japanese American?

KY: Yeah, they work at Sacred Heart, yeah. But I don't, we don't know them, they just came in. The reason I know is I'm making this Japanese community phone book, I update it, I've been doing this for the past (...) twenty years, and I'm just doing one now. And there's a lot of names in there, I don't know who they are, but they give me all these names, and some of them are doctors and there's three or four doctors working at Sacred Heart, and I don't even know who they are, never heard of them. So I guess they're coming in town.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.