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TI: Let's go to your father then. So before we go to him being drafted, let's talk about, a little bit about his family, sort of, history in terms of, like your grandparents on your father's side. What can you tell me about them?

DT: Well, my, again, these are interesting stories of Japanese adventurers really. I kind of think, "Would I do the things that they did?" Whether they were just driven by economic need or whatever, just this tremendous courage to basically leave. In this case, my grandfather came from Okinawa. And so I think economic difficulties, and from what I had heard, his family had run a brewery in Okinawa. But his father, my great grandfather, had basically run it into the ground, lots of debt. And so he decided to leave. And he went to Hawaii to cut sugar cane, and decided that was too difficult. I mean, that's backbreaking work. And so he paid a ship's cook on a steamer to stow away. And so he was stowed away in the pantry, and he stayed there by day and then walked the deck at night. And he landed in Eureka, not speaking a word of English, and he made his way down to San Francisco.

TI: How do you end up in Eureka? Isn't that kind of inland? I'm trying to figure out how you would...

DT: I don't know. Again, I've never met the man, and so these were just stories.

TI: That's an interesting story, yeah, how he stowed away and that's how he...

DT: Yeah. And so probably he was an illegal immigrant. [Laughs]

TI: Right. I was going to make that comment. [Laughs]

DT: So, and as a lot of people ended up, ended up in America, he made his way on his own down to San Francisco. And again, my father doesn't even know how he got established, but somehow he was able to scrape enough money together. Well, what he did, evidently, was ran a business of meeting boats of... I don't know whether he was a baishakunin, kind of an intermediary for "picture brides" or whatever, but he used to meet the boats as they came in off Angel Island, and then set up the relationship. So he was able to... and my father, again, how he met my grandmother, I'm not sure. But my father was born in Chinatown in San Francisco, and then ultimately they moved in the area that was known to be Japantown. And he was able to raise enough money to buy a four-room flat on Buchanan Street in San Francisco, which is right in the heart of Japantown called Fuji Hotel. And there's a, when the Smithsonian had an exhibit on the internment, there was a replica taken from a Dorothea Lange photograph of the front of my, of that hotel. And I remember going there as a kid, it was the Fuji Hotel, and Dorothea Lange had taken a picture of these men, they were laborers who stayed there, they came in from the valley. And it was a hotel for immigrants. And that's the business he ran.

Now, the interesting story about that situation is that Japanese Americans, immigrant Japanese, were not able to buy most kinds of real property. So anything having to do with business, agricultural property, business property, the alien land laws, which were common in California and the state of Washington, Arizona, Oregon, prevented immigrant Japanese from owning property. And the way the laws were written is that it said "only persons eligible to be citizens could own property." Well, Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans as well, I believe, could not naturalize. And so the question was, how do you get ahead in America if you can't own property? And the answer is you can't. So basically, the whole concept was, of California legislature at that time, was to get the benefit of immigrant labor, but then make sure that they don't establish roots here, and keep them moving. And so this was a dilemma that they faced, and so what they, the things that they did to get around the law. And in this case, my grandfather had the foresight to connect with a Caucasian lawyer by the name of Guy Caulden. And Caulden ran a practice, a two-person practice in San Francisco, and he represented lots of Japanese Americans and also the consulate general of Japan. And what he did was basically he took title to this property, and then held it in trust for the benefit of the firstborn child, which in this case was my father. So at the age of five or six, my father was the owner of the Fuji Hotel. And the way the trust was written is that when he turned twenty-one, the title would automatically vest in him. And so was that legal? Probably not. I mean, it was a maneuver around that law, but basically that's what people did. The other techniques, I think, were to establish corporations and had the corporation own it rather than the Japanese American immigrant. And whether anybody looked under the rug to see who the ultimate owners were, I imagine they didn't or if they did, there would be some pretty draconian consequences, people losing land. There were civil penalties as well as even criminal sanctions for that.

TI: But at least in this case, because the family owned the land, they had something to return to after the war.

DT: They did, yeah. And they... it was an arrangement made... again, his father had died before the internment. So it was in his, he's probably twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. So he had to make arrangements with the bank to hold the property. And then he hired an African American, actually, caretaker, to take care of the property while they were gone. And they did all this not knowing whether they would ever return, and made arrangements for the money to be transferred from the bank to make the monthly mortgage payment, evidently, from their savings. So they were able to return to that property. And then that property stood there until the 1960s when San Francisco had this policy of removing blight in the city under the guise of redevelopment. And those neighborhoods were then plowed under, and what stands in its place is now known as the Japantown Center, which is right in the heart of San Francisco. But those used to be the neighborhoods. And now the irony is that the Japantown Center, which is a modern mall in the middle of Japantown, it's really iconic and it's identified in Japantown. But that is not the real Japantown from the community, that's a creation of the redevelopment process.

TI: Excellent. I'm glad we got this documented. That's a good story. So I now want to kind of shift -- well, before I go there, how many children did your father's family have? I mean, how many siblings did your dad have?

DT: Let me think. One, two... were there four of them? I think so.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.