<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Going back to your life, so we, you went to Denver, you mentioned your father had a stroke, and I'm trying to figure out, so how did you get from Denver back to Chicago?

MH: Well first, when my father was so sick he wanted to go back to Seattle, so somebody offered my mother a job at a hotel, so we went back to Seattle for one summer in 1946. But then my sister in Chicago was going to get married, so my mother and I came for the wedding, and then we decided we were going to all stay in Chicago.

TI: Now why is that? So you had grown up in Seattle, your father liked Seattle.

MH: In Seattle, yeah.

TI: Why leave Seattle to go to Chicago?

MH: 'Cause my other brothers and sister were here. They were all here, so we decided the whole family should be in Chicago then.

TI: And why did they want to be in Chicago and not come back to the West Coast?

MH: Yeah, I wonder. [Laughs] Sometimes I think to myself I wish I had stayed in Seattle, but since I had a sister and two brothers living in Chicago and they had jobs here, well, we decided to settle here.

TI: And how would you say Chicago is different than Seattle? What were some of the big differences?

MH: Maybe the, the jobs. Although, Seattle probably... I don't know, 'cause when my mother's younger brother graduated from MIT back in 1932 he couldn't get a job in Seattle, so he went to Japan and he became a professor at Waseda University. But I imagine if, he might've been able to get a job in Chicago.

TI: So jobs were much easier to get for Japanese in Chicago?

MH: Maybe.

TI: How about the Japanese community here? In Seattle your grandfather, your family were all very prominent in Seattle with a large Japanese community. What was Chicago like in terms of Japanese community?

MH: Well, there were a few other kenjinkai people here, and then my mother and father became active in a Japanese church, and of course the family was here. And my three older siblings all got married in 1946 and settled in Chicago.

TI: But my sense is you don't have the same kind of community type of things.

MH: But it was different after the war, after you lost everything.

TI: And how is that? When you were, why was it different?

MH: Well, we, I mean, my grandfather was gone and, I don't know, we didn't have, we had lost our, whatever we had.

TI: So when you think about your family and what it used to have before the war and then how the war changed all of that --

MH: Everything.

TI: Do you ever have any bitterness about what happened?

MH: Not really.

TI: Now, why is that? Because you, I mean, your family lost a lot because of the war.

MH: Mostly my mother lost a lot, yeah.

TI: Well, your father, I mean, when you think of your whole family, how, when you think about the trajectory of, if the war had not happened, what could have happened in terms of your family, and then the war and how much had changed.

MH: It's, mostly the hard part is that my father had the stroke and couldn't work any longer. So, and then my three older siblings got married and then had their own responsibilities, so my mother and I had to work, and my two other brothers went to school.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.