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MA: So I wanted to talk with you also about redress. And you had mentioned earlier, we had talked about redress a little bit. So we were talking about, you know on the phone, about how you spent your redress money, in going to Japan. Can you talk about that a little bit?

CT: Yeah, after we got our redress money, I wanted to be able to help our Yonsei kids kind of connect with their heritage, and so I used my money and we took the family and then we joined my brother and his children and then my aunt and uncle and their grandchildren. And so we took like a family trip and went back. We took a tour of Japan, but we all went back to Fukuoka, where my grandfather was and the family still owns the house. And so, it was kind of neat to have our children connect with the Japan relatives. And then we happened to have a relative who was a retired teacher who was also interested in the family history. And he went back and traced the family back to, I think, the year that they got the name, before people didn't have last names. So I know that it went back as far as like 900 A.D., we've got records of that, when the family got the name. And then, he did a family tree of everybody including the American, Japanese American side and it was written in English and in Japanese. So when we went back, we had this large sheet of paper and you could track and find out so that as you went from person to person and they pointed out what they were, because they could read the Japanese, then my children could look and say, "Oh, okay, we're connected here, here, and here." So they were able to meet and communicate somehow, 'cause they don't speak Japanese, with the family. And that really was, it was a really strong move, I'm really glad that I used my redress money to kind of pull the family together. And so we still have a lot of contact with, with the family in Japan. But that's on my maternal side. And we've never really been able to connect, even though we have the family translation of the koseki, but there aren't that many family relatives left on Shikoku.

MA: Which is your paternal side.

CT: Yeah, my paternal side, yeah.

MA: So how many children do you have?

CT: Just two.

MA: And what are their names? And --

CT: We have Cindy, and she's married to Kyle Nagai. And our son Tim is not married.

MA: Are they in the Denver area?

CT: In the Denver area, yeah.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.