<Begin Segment 18>

TI: Okay, so, Yutaka, that's all my questions, is there anything else that you want to talk about that maybe I forgot or didn't ask you about that you want to talk about?

YI: That's about it, you know, mine is a pretty simple life. [Laughs]

TI: No, it's really interesting though. Thank you for sharing all the stories, especially about the plantation life, I didn't know as much.

YI: I think it's almost same in every sugar plantation, I think because, the thing is that we never talked about kenjinkai. Let me see now, my neighbor, I know was from Hiroshima-ken and then there was some Okinawa-ken people and there was Fukushima, Niigata, Yamaguchi but no reference was made to, you know, where they came from in Japan because, it was, I mean, it was nobody's business, right, I mean, most of them had nothing to talk about, you know, and they never talked... anybody in my family, they never talked to us about Japan. And we didn't know any better to ask, I think.

TI: But how about when you're growing up, did your parents want you to marry Hiroshima-ken, did they talk about that?

YI: Yeah, well, now I'm very involved with the gunjinkai, okay, this is the, I guess a district in Hiroshima, I think there are five or six district in Hiroshima. So... what was I going to say? So we talk about it, I've taken my group, the Takata Gunjinkai group members, I've taken them to Takata-gun three times in the last fifteen or twenty years. You know, what we call furusato. In fact, I'm planning another one this year in November.

TI: So it sounds like you want to keep this connection?

YI: Yes, I want the members to stay connected to their family and most of them don't speak Japanese, very limited so if they would give me the lead, you know, like telephone number, I would call and say that, "I'm calling on Tom Ikeda's behalf. Your relatives, so and so, in Hawaii would like to meet you, you know, we would plan to come to Japan in November. We don't have the details of the exact itinerary but if you will agree to meet me, then they would be very pleased." And from there on primarily just to go get the koseki, you know, the family registry and then to go hakamairi and then most of them they have tears in their eyes, you know, hakamairi.

TI: It's a little ironic or interesting, you know, earlier in the story you talk about how your father would, you know, help communicate for some of the workers back to Japan with the letters, he would write letters back and forth. And you're doing a similar thing now, you're helping Japanese Americans connect to their homeland by over the phone communicating for them, so it's like in some ways you're doing the same thing your father did.

YI: And then some of the villages are disappearing, right, they merged into a bigger one. So trying to compile a record, you know, where the immigrants came from and I don't find it in the map today because those small, what you call, villages no longer exist. But I have... I was able to get an immigration list from Takata-gun and there about 2,700 names in there, you know. And I understand there's a master list of immigrants from Hiroshima and the city hall in Takata-gun went and extracted their Takata-gun people that immigrated, I think it's all to Hawaii. The only problem is that some the Japanese names are hard to read, so I'm telling the members that well, give me something that I can match with, the immigration list and just last week, I found, what you call, a family's immigration information.

TI: Interesting, so you do lots of research for families.

YI: Yeah, but very limited, you know, because I'm can't read or write, I mean, to the extent that, you know.

TI: But then it's so appreciative because families are able to make that connection that most of us have lost in many ways.

YI: Yeah, I think that's important, you know, and the kids are beginning to ask about their roots, yeah, and so I mean for many of them it's a blank, I mean, you know, some of them don't even know what part of Japan their parents came from. And I think that's sad, yeah.

TI: Well, so Yutaka, thank you so much for doing this interview. This was good, this was really interesting.

YI: I think I rambled but...

TI: No, no, this was really good, you're a good story teller, this was good, thank you so much.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.