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TI: So let's, let's focus on your father a little bit.

NA: Yeah.

TI: So he comes over as, essentially as a boy. He's about twelve.

NA: He was twelve. He's traveling on his own, he's in second class on the boat, and so, but he said being by himself and traveling companion was an older person who was supposed to watch out for him. But being young he ended up, says it was like being the monkey general because he'd go down to the steerage and they'd all rally and they had the run of the ship -- as much as they could -- and fuss around. But in Hawaii he would talk about being, going off the boat and he bought bananas and oranges. And oranges was just so great that he wasn't gonna share with anybody. Banana, bananas he gave to all his boat friends. And so when they arrived to San Francisco he got off at the embarcadero and not on Angel Island, and that's where he was met with his father and one of the older brothers, Satoji.

TI: So explain that. Why, why not Angel Island?

NA: Because he's second class and it's the steerage that went and people who were in steerage that went to Angel Island. If you were first class or second class you'd disembark in San Francisco right by the embarcadero by Ferry Building.

TI: And you would just go through immigration there?

NA: Right.

TI: I see. I didn't, I didn't know that.

NA: Yeah, I didn't know that either.

TI: You also used a term to describe him earlier... we'll come back to that later. I can't remember what the term you used, I wasn't familiar. Yakisoba? What was it?

NA: [Laughs] Yakisoba? My dad was not a yakisoba.

TI: No, it was... I'll come back to it later. I think it had to relate by being a young... anyway.

DH: Yobiyose.

NA: Yobiyose.

TI: Yeah. So explain that term.

NA: Yobiyose. Yobiyose is a term that there is an Issei over here, okay, and that is my grandfather, and he then calls over a child who was born in Japan. So yobiyose, and that was a term, I don't know who created this Japanese American term.

TI: Okay. No, that's good. I didn't know that either.

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