<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So let me ask a little bit about your mother. So what was your...

FH: My mother was from Nagaoka, Niigata-ken, one train stop away from the main Niigata city, Niigata-shi.

TI: And what was her name?

FH: Her name was Fusatani Takato. Takato. She said her father owned land, and that she, her two brothers that I met, were, one's a medical doctor and other was a professor of botany at a university. So evidently, her background comes from a wealthy family. And why she came, and she was a midwife. My guess is that Mrs. Abiko chose her because she was a midwife, and brought her to become my future father's wife.

TI: And your mother. [Laughs]

FH: Yes. So my mother, Tani Takato, got married to Yajuro Hoshiyama in 1912 in San Francisco. And they immediately, they moved back to Livingston, California, where my father had already established a home. First, he was still at another farm working there as a foreman. He worked there eight years, and then he saved his money and put a down payment on a piece of land called Livingston Vineyard and Orchard. He had to have a corporation because he couldn't own land.

TI: Oh, so this was outside of the Yamato Colony.

FH: No, no. It is part of the Yamato Colony.

TI: Oh, part of it.

FH: All this is part of Yamato Colony. Abiko and his group formed this Yamato Colony in 1906, and he comes to visit many, many times. Every time he'd come to visit Livingston, he would stay with my father's place, in a shack. And I thought, "Here's a man that could afford a hotel room, and yet he stays in a shack." Well, I learned they're same ken. [Laughs] So they became friends that way.

TI: Okay, so your father then formed his own corporation so he could buy land...

FH: All the farm has names. Why? Because that protected them from the law. Unequal, unfair immigration law that this country has had and still has, in some cases.

TI: As well as the, back then, they had the alien land laws.

FH: Yeah, group started to develop all kinds of laws that prevented him from owning property, correct. And then they would also use, he moved when I was born so that I'm the president of this corporation. I'm a citizen, but a baby. And so they got a law that says you can't do that. Person doesn't even know what he's doing, you can't make him a president of a corporation. Which I didn't know when I was growing up, but later I learned that this is the way they got around the immigration laws.

TI: Oh, so as an infant, you were already the president of the corporation.

FH: [Laughs] And so was all the other farm people. They didn't know it.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. So you were born into the YMCA...

FH: Yeah, for that part, that's correct.

TI: ...and then you immediately became a corporate president. [Laughs]

FH: That's correct. That's interesting, isn't it?

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.