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TI: Yeah, I want to ask a couple more questions about Spokane before we go to Japan. Spokane had other Japanese families.

FH: Oh, yes.

TI: Did you, did you ever do anything with other Japanese families in Spokane?

FH: Yes. We used to have the picnic and so forth. It was the Japan Association, and my dad was the head of that organization. And so we used to have the picnic and so forth, yes.

TI: Now, so how did you avoid Japanese school? Because other Japanese in Spokane, I think they had a Japanese school and they all had to go to that. But you didn't have to go?

FH: I was still too young when we were living in town, then we moved out to the farmland, and so it was quite a distance to the downtown, so we never had to go to Japanese language school.

TI: The other thing when I think of Spokane in terms of church, they had two major churches. They had the Methodist church and then the Buddhist church. Was your family involved with one of those churches?

FH: Not at all. But when my brother was young, he had some kind of a trouble in the brain, and he had the surgery. I don't know how he... he did have the surgery, but he got well. And at that time, there was the Catholic, you know, Spokane is a Catholic country, and so one of the pastor, I don't know who it was, came to pray for him and so forth. Which, later on, when my dad was in the fifties or sixties, he got baptized and became a Methodist. But it was, God was working through him in those days, but he never attended any of those. And, of course, religion was, according to the Japanese tradition, it is the family religion, so it was Buddhist, but we never practiced Buddhist, not even had the thing like that, Buddhist altar and so forth, not in our home.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.