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Title: Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga Interview II
Narrator: Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Torrance, California
Date: July 7, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-haiko-03-0022

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TI: And so you mentioned how you met Jack Herzig.

AH: Uh-huh.

TI: And then married and went down to D.C. But I guess the first question is how did you meet Jack?

AH: Well, actually, I met him in Japan. It's interesting that you ask that. [Laughs] Because he, Jack happened to belong to the same CIC unit, the Counterintelligence Corps unit that my then-husband belonged to, which was headquartered in Kyoto, but the sub-branch was in Otsu, where we lived. And so we used to see a lot of each other during that time, and we were all friendly. We used to join each other at the officer's club and have dinner at each other's homes. Then when Jack and his family left Japan in the summer of '54, and just at that time, we were transferred from the Kyoto area to Nagoya. So we were in Nagoya from early spring or summer to the end of '54, December, when we came back to the United States. And we had exchanged, our families stayed in touch, we exchanged Christmas greetings and things like that. But, and then all of a sudden, in 1976, when I was in New York, living in Manhattan, I get this call from Jack saying, "Hi, this is Jack. I'm downstairs." [Laughs] So how many years? Twenty years or... '54, '64... yeah, twenty-something years had gone by. "Oh, Jack. Okay." So it turned out that he had separated from his wife, and eventually his wife passed away anyway, she was very sick. But it was twenty-something years, and we picked up the... there was something right about, there's, nothing happened in Japan, but all those years, we just sort of stayed in touch. And it was, so it seemed like, "Oh, haven't seen you since yesterday," kind of feeling. I think when the chemistry is right, that kind of feeling prevails. So it was that many years. [Laughs] We decided to get married. 'Cause I'd been, by that time, I'd been separated for fifteen more years or so, longer than that, when Davis said he wanted to get remarried, so can we be divorced? We had been separated the umpteen years. I said, "Sure."

TI: And so when you got married to Jack, how old were your children at that time?

AH: How old were they?

TI: Yeah.

AH: This is '76, okay, 1978 is when we got married. Lisa was born in '51, so what does that make her?

TI: So she's twenty-seven.

AH: Yeah, twenty-seven. Oh, maybe... and Geri was already married and she had a son.

TI: And David?

AH: David was two years younger than Lisa.

TI: So about twenty-five.

AH: Yeah. So they were okay with it, okay with it.

TI: That's sweet.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.