Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Ron Osajima Interview
Narrator: Ron Osajima
Interviewer: Brian Niiya
Location: Yorba Linda, California
Date: December 9, 2021
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-486-17

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BN: And then before, we'll get to your professional and career in a minute, but I want to loop back to your family. So while you're going to college, your parents are continuing, your dad is still doing, selling stuff off his truck.

RO: Off his truck, right.

BN: And your mom is working at a school.

RO: Yeah.

BN: Did they, I mean, you had been in Manzanar and so forth, did they ever talk about any of that to you ever?

RO: No. I think that's typical of their group, they don't discuss things like that.

BN: Did they ever? Even during the redress era or later?

RO: By then, I was living on the East Coast and really didn't spend a lot of time with them. I think my father died, but my mother was still alive, and I would go back to see her, but she didn't talk about that. I think that was typical of them.

BN: Through that time period. And what about your brother and sister?

RO: Yeah, my... let's see, my sister married a white man and my brother married three, at least three white women. So our whole family was, I think we were all just kind of getting beyond the JA world. So I don't think either of them paid attention, and I didn't really until I divorced my first wife and I started to get back into the JA, well, actually, it wasn't just JA, it was all people of color. And I joined a group and we did a lot of stuff there.

BN: Yeah, I was just curious about that. It is interesting, it's fairly unusual, actually, that all three of you would have married non-Japanese at that point in time. Maybe ten or twenty years later it was very common, but not at that time so much. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so you graduated UCLA. You ended up getting a degree in that?

RO: Yeah.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.