<Begin Segment 12>

BY: And so what was it like being one of a few Japanese American doctors either in Emanuel Hospital or in the community? What was that like?

HY: Well, in Japanese, atarimae, regular, reason for that is because that's the way I was in Philadelphia and Denver, too.

BY: It felt normal to you.

HY: Didn't go around mingling with the hakujin friends, trying to make hakujin friends.

BY: Even when you got back to Oregon?

HY: Oh, yeah. It's been very difficult to assimilate, if that's the correct word, with the hakujin population because I didn't grow up under that kind of thinking. The mentality wasn't there.

BY: So who was your first good hakujin friend? Was it Fish Foster?

HY: But that was in high school.

BY: Okay, well...

HY: Okay, in high school it was Fish Foster and then in Philadelphia... I didn't have any Denver. And in Philadelphia it was Ephraim Zackson, and in Portland it will probably be Ray Veillet and Dean Earhart. I did a lot of hunting and fishing with him.

BY: But otherwise you just pretty much stuck with...

HY: Well, I'm a Nisei. Nisei are very different from... Nisei and Issei are very different.

BY: And what do you mean by that?

HY: Well, because we were mainly very insular, we hung to ourselves. Particularly Issei, because, number one, they didn't know the language or the customs. We did, but we also knew that we'd been crapped upon and spit upon all our lives, and we were looked upon as second-class citizens. So out of self-defense, we kind of withdrew everything. Although there were exceptions, people like Ken Sugioka and maybe Mike Masaoka said, "You got to go out and mingle with the haoles, show 'em you're as good as anybody else and all that. But most of us, that didn't take, because it was too hard to do. It was difficult.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.