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MA: I was curious about the Japanese American community in general in the Bay Area, in San Francisco at that time. What was the state of the community and what, can you describe that a little bit?

JH: You know, I wasn't a part of the Japanese American community in San Francisco before the strike. You know, the Japanese American community is kind of insular, so when you come in from the outside, unless you spent a lot of time trying to enter into the scene. So I never did, because I was busy trying to settle in at San Francisco State, and that was my main problem. And then when we initially came to San Francisco, I couldn't get housing right away because of discrimination. Because I was looking for apartments in a, the better districts because the schools were -- I found out which grade schools were better, because I wanted the kids to have a good education. And when I first drove into San Francisco, I remember driving around the Twin Peaks area because I heard... and there'd be signs, I'd go over there, and they said, "Oh, the place has been rented," or something like that, and I couldn't get in. And then we even had to sleep in the car one night because we couldn't find a place to stay. And finally, we found somewhere in San Francisco, and then my wife started looking around to, so that we could buy a house right away. And we were looking various places, and then found this house in Mill Valley, and Mill Valley has real good schools. And so we found a house there, and as I say, Hayakawa happened to be living there also, but we didn't, of course, know him at first. And that's, it's mainly because of the elementary schools that we were making these kinds of choices. And you know, there weren't very many Japanese living there. There weren't very many ethnics living there, except in a place called Marin City, a housing development that developed there during the war, because they were recruiting people to work in the shipyards in Sausalito. And lot of African Americans came up from south, and Marin City is still largely African American. But the rest of Mill Valley, there's not too many ethnics, except there's a community in San Rafael of Latin Americans.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.