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PF: So while you were, before you came back to Hawaii, you had met your wife Fuku. Can you tell us about the story?

TT: I met her during...

PF: During school?

TT: During school, yeah. Let's see. Maybe it's a long story. I met her in my last year in law school when I was, went down to Washington, D.C. to find a summer job. See, in those days, kids from Hawaii during summer vacation, we couldn't afford to come all the way back to Hawaii. In the first place, you had a train ride across the continent, then get on a boat and come back to Hawaii. And by that time you only had three or four weeks to spend, you've got to turn around and go back. Nowadays, kids go on Halloween, Thanksgiving, every conceivable break of their own here. There was nothing like that. So anyway, we had to find summer jobs. And I was in Washington, D.C. looking for a job.

But the story goes way back to my army days, military days, when just before we were going overseas, we got one last pass. And at that time I was training in McDill Field, Florida, and we got a pass to go to visit Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. So as we were going through Washington, D.C., I called up my friend Kazuo Yamane, who I'd known at the University of Hawaii, and he was one of the Military Intelligence soldiers. Actually, he was one of the first Nisei to be allowed inside the Pentagon, 'cause in those days it was highly restricted. Anyway, he was serving in Washington, D.C., and I called him. And he said, "You want to go out for a date?" I was with another guy, Nakahara. Said, "Sure." And so he fixed us up, and we went out to dinner. And so there were two Kotonk girls that he invited as our dates. We went to a nice restaurant in Washington. Not my date, but the other date named Ann Kurimoto was a very warm, friendly person. And so even during the war, she used to send Christmas cards and all that to both of us when we were out in India and Burma.

Well, anyway, rolling back the clock to 1949 I guess, summer, I'm in Washington, D.C. looking for a job. There was a big firm, Arnold, Fortis and Porter, that I had called on for if they needed a summer clerk. And after I left there, I noticed it was on Sixteenth Street Northwest, and that was the same street that this Ann lived on. So I thought, gee, maybe I'd give her a call. So when I went up to the apartment and knocked on the door, door opened and I was greeted by a girl named Fuku Yokoyama, who became Mrs. Ted Tsukiyama. That's how I met.

PF: It' s a great story. So after you graduated from school, you had kept in touch with Fuku and you decided, what, how did you maneuver all of this?

TT: Graduate? Well, yeah, after that, my last year, we had weekends like the Yale-Harvard game, we'd invite friends to go see the game and attend the picnic and all that. So I called, invited Fuku, so she came up to Yale a couple of times. So by the end of that school year, with the exchange of correspondence and so forth, we got engaged. So by the time I graduated... no, I wasn't engaged yet. But anyway...

PF: How did Fuku feel about the thought of moving to Hawaii?

TT: Well, I guess if she was gonna, was willing to marry a Hawaii boy, she knew that she'd be ending up in Hawaii. So she didn't turn down my proposal, so I guess she was willing to live in Hawaii. I came home first, straight after law school, because I said I wanted to pass the bar and be a lawyer with the ability to earn an income before I bring anybody down to get married. So it wasn't 'til December 1950 that I passed the bar, so that's when I called Fuku to come to Hawaii and then we got married. We got married February 17, 1951. See? I know the date of my anniversary.

PF: What was Fuku doing in D.C.? Was she working?

TT: Yeah. Well, her story is, of course, that her family from Salinas, her father was a very successful farmer. And they grew, like he was a lettuce farmer. They didn't just have garden plants, they had acres and acres. But all that was, they had to give up. When they were ordered to evacuate, and so her family was moved to Poston, Arizona. And incidentally, her father was taken away because he was one of the community leaders of the Japanese community in Salinas. So Fuku had three brothers and a sister younger than she, and her mother, of course, didn't speak English. So Fuku, being only a sophomore, junior in high school, sort of became like the head of the family. And so in Poston, I guess she was there a couple of years, near the end of it, at that time you could go out of camp if you were going to school or had a job. And so she wanted to go to nursing school, so she was able to leave camp and go to Philadelphia to a St. Elizabeth Hospital nursing school. So she became a nurse, and then in 1948 or so, '49, went to Washington, D.C., to get a job as a nurse at the Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C. So that's why she was in Washington, D.C. when I met her.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.