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BY: And so then you got married, you lived in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a while, and then you decided to return to Oregon. So when and why did you return to Oregon?

HY: Well, there were two reasons. One, the main reason is because my father and mother had moved back to Portland, Oregon. Not moved back, they moved to Portland, Oregon, from Denver in 1946 when my father bought a home on, strangely enough, on 52nd Avenue, which is where I live. But he and Mom were alone and they were getting, when I say elderly, they were in their fifties. [Laughs]

BY: No, older than that. Older than that.

HY: Yeah, they were getting close to sixty by then. "Elderly," you know. So I thought, well, gee, they'd probably feel better if one of their kids was near 'em. And I, looking around at what I wanted to do with my medical career, because I had already finished my internship. After I finished my internship, I got married to Miki in 1950. So 1951 I spent the year in Poughkeepsie, New York, as a general (...) resident, which is kind of a glorified second year of internship. They don't do that anymore, but in those days they did. Then I said, well, what do I want to be? What do I want to do? I didn't feel prepared enough after general residency. Although I could have practiced general medicine and become a general practitioner, but I didn't think I'd want to do that. So I took a general surgical residency at Emanuel Hospital, which is in Portland, Oregon. So that fitted in just right with being in Portland with my folks. So that was the main reason. But the other reason was I had a bigger brother, Choppy, Ray Tsuyoshi Yasui, who was running the family farm on Willow Flat, and that's not far, so I knew I'd be seeing them. So I'd have family, so that was a very major reason.

BY: And when you first came back to Oregon, where did you live? And so you were doing this residency at Emanuel, but where did you live?

HY: We lived, Miki and I lived in an apartment called Varnell Apartments on 32nd and Belmont or near 32nd and Belmont. That's where you were born, as a matter of fact, in a few more days. [Laughs]

BY: Okay, yeah. And then so you lived in these apartment buildings and you were a resident in Emanuel Hospital. And were there a lot of other Japanese American doctors there, or were you the only one?

HY: Well, you mean in Portland?

BY: Yeah.

HY: No, no, there weren't very many. There was one practicing doctor there, Dr.... I forgot his name. Anyway, there was one practicing doctor, and there were about three or four medical residents of Japanese ancestry. And Emmanuel Hospital, there had been another one named Toshiaki Kuge, who was ahead of me, he was a 442 veteran. And in another hospital, there were two or three. So in the whole town of Portland, maybe there were four or five medical personnel, not all in surgery, in different fields. But there were only one or two practices -- oh, Dr. Kinoshita. Dr. Kinoshita was one of them. There was another doctor, too, in the entire town of Portland, two Nikkei. And both of them had been from Hawaii. [Narr. note: The second practicing Nisei doctor in Portland was Dr. Robert Shiomi -- who was an Issei -- from Japan.]

BY: Interesting.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.