<Begin Segment 25>

TI: I'm curious, were you ever asked to return to -- because of your English ability -- return to the United States and be a Buddhist minister at one of the churches or betsuins in the United States?

KY: From BCA?

TI: From BCA.

KY: Nobody ever said that, nobody encouraged me, nor was I that eager at the time, because I was a civil service employee. And you retire, you get a nice pension. [Laughs]

TI: So your regular job was still working with the government as a civil service, this is the United States government. And then on, like, weekends, you would...

KY: Weekends you went to Tsukiji Hongwanji, and carried on the weekday services purely on a voluntary basis, no pay involved at all.

TI: So during this time, did you think that you would perhaps live in Japan the rest of your life?

KY: That never came to mind.

TI: You mean you never thought that, thought about it or you didn't think that you would stay in Japan?

KY: I would not in the sense that there's nothing that would hold me there. What happened was that I have two sons, Dennis, who stayed in Seattle, and I had one son in Japan. And I was married before I married my current wife, and she was a daughter of, eldest daughter, no sons in the family, of a temple called Myoenji. And that used to be located in Tsukiji, right near the fish market where you're talking about visiting. And that area, in other words, even before the fish market thing, here was a big main betsuin. Now, a betsuin has sub-temples under it, even over here. But in Tokyo and in Kyoto, if there's a betsuin, then clustered around there are other temples, sub-temples, kind of like spokes running out. And Myoenji was one of those temples. And the head priest of that Myoenji said, "This is no place to be for a temple," once the fish market came. "This is no place for a temple," so he moved the entire temple, moved it since the facilities moved, including the tombstones from the cemetery they had. Moved it all to right near Kawasaki, present. And that's where the eldest daughter of that temple, I married, and she died when she was thirty-nine. And my son then went to take over the temple in the sense that that temple had no sons. And there's a blood connection, you see, to that temple by my son. So my son became the... and he got to be the head priest of that temple. So by the time I left Japan, he was there. So actually, I had no temple or anything. So I had nothing to really hold me back in Japan.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.