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TI: But still thinking 2042, which is still a ways off, what do you think the Japanese American community will look like? I mean, you've been involved with the community, very actively volunteering for decades with some of these institutions, and so you've seen the changes. So we're 2011, so thirty more years, what does the community look like in thirty years?

JY: I think we'll have a hard time finding out who's who, I mean, which nationality you belong to. Like the people from the European country today, they been here in the country 250 years. Look how well they are mixed today. Lot of people don't know what backgrounds is now, and that's only two hundred years. It's another fifty years, I think, that'll be like the Japanese people. I would say 75 percent, maybe 80 percent be mixed over. And like our family, I have four kids, only one is married to a Japanese. So there it is. Their offsprings comes up, and well, that's more power to them.

TI: So is that going to be harder for the Japanese American story to be told when it's all sort of mixed like that? What do you think's gonna happen?

JY: I think like right now they're researching the slavery. They're going back to Africa to look for their forefathers, and then I think it'd be in the same situation. The Japanese American kids will have a hard time tracing back. But we had to have a place like this to leave the tracks behind so they can come back to this track here and look for it and see how it was at 2010, what we did in 2010 here, or it's 2011 now, that we are, that museum to preserve our heritage, the Japanese American heritage. And if you want to look for your grandparents, great-great grandparents, there it is, their story. It might not be like yours, but general idea is here, you can find it. Look at the library, look at the many books, there's almost a thousand books been written since 1942 about Japanese Americans. That's only about half of it, right? There must be how much more, don't you think? There's a lot of books been written about Japanese Americans, so there it is. We ourselves should be proud that people are willing to write books about us. I mean, it shows you that the power of the Japanese American, that people are willing to sit down and do the research, sure, it's second, third party, but still, they're writing the story as they see it. The struggles, what they made, made their lives out of, how they come about and so forth. And I think that's what the whole thing is to leave that lineage, not to cut it off, leave the lineage ongoing, keep on going.

TI: Good.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.