<Begin Segment 21>

MA: Going back a little bit to your time in Chicago, so your father operated a Japanese restaurant. And Chicago probably had, at that point, a pretty large Japanese American community?

GH: It was Japanese town, it was J-Town, and you know where it was? The famous Al Capone -- have you heard about, I don't know, you folks are so young, the old gangster days, Al Capone, and they always called that Garage Massacre, St. Valentine's Day Massacre. This garage was on Clark Street. Clark Street was the main Japanese town. We always tell people, boy, that was right here about a block from our restaurant, and we lived right near there. But that's where a lot of gangsters lived, around there. So it became Japanese town after the war. And they were -- oh, and the other one is Iva Toguri, Tokyo Rose, her parents had an import/export firm there, pretty big store. And she was... in fact, when I was in Chicago, she was released from prison and there was all this publicity in the paper. And she just quietly lived with her parents, came to live and help at the store, and had a quiet life. But poor thing, you know, they had all this bad publicity about her.

MA: How did people in the community treat her?

GH: I don't know, because she's in Japanese town. So maybe it was a little easier in Japanese town where she didn't go out and mingle. If she had a regular job outside, maybe it was easier to just stay with her family business.

MA: But in the Japanese community, she was able to sort of keep a low profile.

GH: Uh-huh. I think so. I think the Japanese didn't do anything to her, I don't think so. But, yeah, it was really a Japanese town. I heard it isn't there anymore, that town. And it used to be all restaurants and stores. It was just, we weren't used to that, but it was like... we were living up north in Chicago.

MA: So you lived away from your restaurant?

GH: No. At that time, we were living up north and my dad comes home one night and he tells my mother... he would go up to Clark Street to visit some friends and cronies and he would come home and he says, "You know what? I bought a restaurant and you're gonna do the cooking," because she's a good cook. But it's a lot of work for her. She'd go, "Oh, not again." Poor thing, she doesn't have a choice, he already bought it. And so he says, "Oh, you're gonna do really, really well there," and he said, "I'll fix that place up and we're gonna get the customers in there," and he went on and on. All his ideas again. So he did. In those days, they didn't have, it's like Hawaii, we didn't have air conditioning everywhere. Before, a lot of places weren't air conditioned. Well, they didn't either. He put in air conditioner, put in new furniture. He didn't do anything fancy, it was just a plain restaurant. But man, he had so much business. People were standing in line and waiting. And so a lot of the restaurants over there, they weren't doing well. But he just did a thriving business. He used to get people like students from Korea, students from Japan who are interning medical students. And hospital, 'cause they had big hospitals in Chicago, they're interning there, and they used to come over, weekends, when they get their day off. And then he used to get Northwestern students, and then he had the Japanese consul come over. He would sit there and join them and have a drink with them. [Laughs] You know, he liked to socialize, he was always talking to all the customers. So he did a real, real good business. And he eventually sold it to my aunt, his sister, sold it to her, 'cause they got tired. It's tiring, restaurant, for my mother, too, it's tiring for her. So they just retired, retired.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.