Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Homer Yasui Interview
Narrator: Homer Yasui
Interviewers: Barbara Yasui (primary), Tom Ikeda (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: February 11, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-491-6

<Begin Segment 6>

BY: So when you got to Denver then, your brother and sister were there, and so you lived with them? Or where did you live?

HY: No, almost. It didn't quite happen that way. Because what happened is Shu did indeed go to Denver. And he went to, I suppose, until around summer of '42, then he transferred to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. Why he did that, I don't know. He never told me, I never asked him. And Michi, meanwhile, she had also been in Denver, and she had actually graduated, was supposed to graduate from the University of Oregon in 1942 in June, but she left in May. She escaped from Eugene in May and then she went to Denver. But I don't know if she enrolled in college at that time or not. But anyway, since she was going to get graduated, and went to the University of Oregon, she took a job at the War Manpower Commission in Chicago. So she left after she got to Denver. So when I got there, I don't know anybody. Well, I take it back. I knew the Reverend Seiji Uemura, because he was a Methodist minister in Portland that our family knew. So I contacted him, and Reverend Uemura was very, very important, that early-arriving Nikkei like me, because he helped find a place to stay, because I didn't know anybody in Denver. So it turned out that I stayed with Toshio Ando. And the reason I stayed with Toshio Ando is because Shu had roomed with Toshio Ando. Toshio was a, I think maybe he had already attended the Hastings School of Law in California in one year or so, and then he had to get out. But he had escaped on his own before the (army). He went to Denver where he continued his law study. So I roomed with him in Mrs. Snell's rooming apartment -- it was not a boarding house, it was a rooming apartment -- until, gee, a couple years, I guess, until Toshio married my sister, Michi.

BY: So Mrs. Snell's... what's the difference between a rooming house and a boarding house, first? I don't know that.

HY: Well, boarding house, they feed you. At a rooming house, you just got bed and bath.

BY: Okay. And did she rent only to Japanese Americans?

HY: No, no. Mrs. Snell's house was pretty big. She had, the Poirers lived there, I can't remember, no. But there were about three Nikkei residents there, and about two or three hakujin. They weren't family, but a couple.

BY: Okay, and so you started at University of Denver, then, right? And you were there for three or four years then?

HY: Well, I was there from September of '42 'til about August of '45, yes, three years.

BY: Okay. And then you lived in Mrs. Snell's rooming house that whole time?

HY: Oh, yeah.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.