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FO: Well, the thing is, he knew my father, and then when they met in Japan, Grandpa Yamazaki asked my dad, "What are you doing here?" And my dad told him, "I'm looking for a wife."

SY: So he says, "I may know somebody," so he introduced, Grandpa Yamazaki introduced my dad to my mother's family. And my mother was a young, fifteen, sixteen years old, and my dad wanted to get married to her, and her father asked her, "Do you want to go to the United States?" and she said, "Yes."

FO: So she was married then to your father when she was very, very young.

SY: Young, yeah. And so did Father Yamazaki have then sort of a guardianship of your...

FO: Yeah. The thing is, my mother's family or parents told Reverend Yamazaki that, "Yoroshiku tanomimasu, we're going to depend on you to watch over our daughter." So they are... that's why the so-called Yamazaki family and the Omatsu family, we're close, but we're not related. Because my grandfather, I guess, tanomu, Reverend Yamazaki, 'cause my mother, a young lady, was going to come. So if anything happened, she was supposed to contact Reverend Yamazaki and he will help out.

SY: Wow. So he must have really trusted your father, too.

FO: Yeah.

SY: And so then they ended up coming straight to Los Angeles, and can you tell us a little bit about that uptown area? Because it's not really considered uptown today, right?

FO: Well, we considered it uptown, but the people in uptown now doesn't consider it. I don't know what they call it now. But we had a lot of Japanese settled in there, thanks to Grandpa Yamazaki and his recruiting to get a church. And he got all these young people to come, and they settled in the Uptown area, that's between Vermont and Western and Olympic and San Marino.

SY: So it's west downtown L.A., but about how many miles?

FO: Three or four miles.

SY: Three or four miles. And so this is way before the war, there was an area in Los Angeles that St. Mary's Episcopal Church was the center of.

FO: Yes.

SY: And so most of the people in that area would go to this church, then.

FO: But the thing is, a lot of these people that lived in the area, they were Buddhist, so they didn't want to get too involved with the Christian church, but Grandpa Yamazaki helped everybody. And they, the people, Grandpa Yamazaki started the Japanese school. And the people around them said, "There's too much Christianity involved in everything Grandpa does," so they broke away, some of them broke away, and they started this Daini Gakuen, the "Number two gakuen" on Fedora.

SY: And they had a Buddhist church in the area, too?

FO: No.

SY: Just the Japanese school?

FO: Yes.

SY: I see. And so they then cut their ties with the Episcopal church.

FO: No, they didn't cut their ties, but the kids all come back to church.

SY: I see, so it's more social then.

FO: Yeah. But the parents, they kind of drifted away. But what are you gonna do?

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.