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EY: And he did well there, and so the teachers encouraged him to go to high school. So he went to the other high school, one was Farrington that my mom went to, McKinley was the other. And that's the same school that Dan Inouye went to. A lot of the future leaders, Japanese American leaders in Hawaii went to this school. And so it was there at this school that the teachers again recognized my dad's potential. And because he was having such difficulty now going back and forth, which would take several hours each day, he was ready to quit but doing well. And so the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private school, talking with teachers from McKinley, decided to offer him a residency scholarship. So he moved into this school in Manoa Valley, very tiny private school, and got a really good education. He also picked up smoking as sixteen year old, and had some fun. Played a lot of sports, was a good athlete. But it was there that he really got, his education was fostered. But when he graduated, he had no visions of anything further. And his family needed money, so he went to work in a store in Kalihi, the same area my mom lived in. And so he lived upstairs in the store and worked, he said, 364 days a year, only New Year's Day off. And he said ten to twelve hours a day, and he was lifting heavy, hundred-pound rice bags and just doing all of this work. And he did it for, I think, four years, and he realized that his was not much of a life. And so because he had been encouraged by his teachers, he decided to go to university. So he went and started there, and then the war broke out, same thing, like my mom.

LB: University of Hawaii.

EY: University of Hawaii. And so he was part of the Varsity Victory Volunteers. At first, the Japanese Americans weren't allowed to enlist, and Min Yasui, in particular, was "de-listed." But they formed the Varsity Victory Volunteers, so they built barracks and did all kinds of stuff. And then finally, the government allowed Japanese Americans to enlist, and so my dad was part of that whole group with Dan Inouye, and many of the future Japanese American leaders, and so they volunteered. And so my dad started out in training with the 442nd and that whole group. And then again, because he did well on tests, he was asked to be in the military intelligence. So he moved to a military intelligence unit, which, lot of ironies later on, considering the Korematsu case and all the things that happened later. But he went to the Philippines and Japan, and was in the Pacific for the duration of the war. And so actually interrogated some of the military generals who were captured after the war, was a translator, actually. Then he came back, and with the GI Bill, went to the University of Hawaii. Turns out, according to my mom, without studying much, he was the valedictorian at the university, and she said that's where he developed his bad habits of just waiting until the last minute and just dashing out his papers and exams and doing well.

And so he then -- unlike his colleagues who, many of them went into law -- Spark Matsunaga went to Harvard and Dan Inouye to George Washington and all these people who became future leaders politically in Hawaii went to law school, my dad went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. And there, they had the leading sociology department in the country for graduate studies, and scholars there. So he studied at the University of Chicago, and that's where my mom, my mom went up, and that's where I was conceived, and they came back home to have me.

From there, my dad was hired by the University of Hawaii. And he was one of the first Asian American (professors) there. And the University of Hawaii was created initially as agricultural land grants, which really helped the plantation owners. And it evolved into a full-fledged university, but there was still a real, sort of, division. All the professors, almost all the professors were white, and so it was sort of an interesting environment for him to come in. And it was there that he really got his start. And my dad liked being a professor, but he also struggled. I never understood why it was such a struggle for him all along. And I didn't understand why one of the areas that he really gravitated to was race relations in Hawaii. And so he had picked up where Andrew Lind, the professor who had helped my mom, he picked up where Andrew Lind had left off. And so that was a lot of my dad's interest, and he would tell me things about Hawaii history, things that we wouldn't hear about, didn't learn about in school about the plantation system, what had happened to native Hawaiians, and about the stratification in Hawaii society even as I was growing up.

And then it turns out that I discovered later that my dad's dissertation at the University of Chicago was focused on the Japanese Americans coming back from being educated after going to World War II, getting educated with the GI Bill, coming back as lawyers, and then being excluded from the white law firms in town. So his dissertation was about the continuing segregation of the legal community in Hawaii. So all these were bits and pieces that I heard about but never meant anything to me of significance, other than when I was in high school, my dad telling me about this in the context of a specific news story that hit the newspapers. And there was one very important club, the Pacific Club, which was where all the elite in Hawaii, almost all Caucasian or haole, were members. And it's where all the big deals were done and everything happened at the Pacific Club, and they had excluded Asian people up to that point. And so some people decided it's time now, this was in the late 1960s. And Supreme Court Justice Masaji Marumoto, Republican, conservative, and so he was put up for membership, and they still excluded him. So this is while I was growing up in high school. So that gave my dad a reason to explain the exclusion from law firms and what this meant. So that really stuck with me. And it actually was one of the seeds that kind of helped, helped me sort of grow into what I've become today.

LB: What was your father's discipline? Sociology?

EY: Sociology. And it was sociology of Japan as well as sociology of race relations, particularly in Hawaii.

LB: So when he came to University of Hawaii, what did he teach?

EY: He came to teach -- excuse me. His discipline when he went to University of Chicago was sociology and the High Theory. But when he came back to University of Hawaii, it was basic intro sociology, but then he developed a specialty in Japan, institutions of Japan, and then he focused specifically on race relations in Hawaii.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.