Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Lucius Horiuchi Interview I
Narrator: Lucius Horiuchi
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Date: November 6, 2007
Densho ID: denshovh-hlucius-01-0002
   
Japanese translation of this segment Japanese translation of complete interview

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Let's go back to your, your father. Tell me a little bit about your father in terms of where he was born and how he came to the United States.

LH: Yes. Actually, my grandfather, Tokutaro Horiuchi, came to Seattle, I think it was 1908, I'm not sure of the year. I'm researching that now. And he had a silk company, and he was a trader, and lived in Seattle. And two or three years later, my father joined him in Seattle. And that's why I jokingly call myself a Nisei-han, two and a half. Because to be a third, my father would have had to have been born in America. But since my grandfather first came to Seattle, I call myself a Nisei-han.

TI: And what was your father's name?

LH: My father was Shigetoshi. And in fact, Mark Horiuchi, who's not famous but getting there, he's a professor, and he's a board member of the Bellevue Art Museum, and was once president of the Art Association of the State of Washington, his middle name is Shigetoshi. So the family, the Horiuchi Shigetoshi name continues.

TI: That's good. Let's talk a little bit about your mother. What's her name and how did she come?

LH: My mother's name was Takeko Miyagawa, and she came from Shizuoka-ken. That's right, my grandfather and father came from Yamanashi-ken. My mother's family were also in the silk business, and my father had come, I told you, to join my grandfather, and then my father went back to Japan in 1917 to marry my mother. She had waited over ten years, and the family were anxious for her to get married, so set up marriage meetings, which she refused to attend. 'Cause she had known that Shigetoshi would come back, and he did, and they were married in Japan in 1917, and returned to Seattle. And the interesting aspect of all of this is my grandfather Tokutaro, in his second marriage, married the oldest of the Miyagawa six daughters, and my father married the youngest. [Laughs]

TI: So they were brother-in-laws, I guess. [Laughs] That's interesting. And so it sounds like your parents, it was a marriage of love. I mean...

LH: Oh yes, oh yes. Like I say, they knew each other well from the time my father was a child, when my grandfather remarried and called my mother Neesan. [Laughs]

TI: Now, you mentioned both families were in the silk business.

LH: Yes.

TI: What, what kind of silk business would be in Seattle? What were they doing, why would there be a silk business in Seattle?

LH: Well, I'm not familiar with the details of that. I don't know if they were tied in with C.T. Takahashi or not, who was a big trader. And I know, because I visited the silk factory that the family owned in the capital city of Yamanashi-ken called Kofu, this was at the tail end of the occupation when I first went to Japan as a member of the Department of State. I was a junior foreign service officer at that time.

TI: Okay, we'll get back to that later.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.