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BY: And so tell me a little bit about the Nikkei community in Denver in those years. What was it like? Were there a lot of people? Did you all stick together, what was it like?

HY: Well, to me, Denver was a hub for Nisei students. Because, of course, socially, I didn't know anybody. I didn't go to the Japanese church, like Methodist Church. And I'm sure they had an organization like JACL, I never went to them. So I don't know how big... they did have a Japanese, quote, "town," called Larimer Street, and there were quite a few Japanese businesses there. But I don't know how many were old-time businesses, or how many had just moved there from the West Coast. But anyway, there was a Japantown, so I'm sure there was a fairly big Japanese community in Denver in my day, although I never participated. What I participated in was in the Nikkei college activity at UC Denver. Because in my three years at Denver, I would guess, conservatively, there were at least a hundred and fifty Nisei students that went to that, including me and my family. I mean, there were a lot of us at one time.

BY: And you were tight, a pretty tight-knit community?

HY: Yeah. And the University of Denver enrollment wasn't very big, it was only like twenty-five hundred. So we were proportionally a pretty big ethnic group.

BY: And was that because of Governor Carr, do you think, that there were so many?

HY: Yes. Well, that was one of the reasons why I suppose a lot of Nikkei did move to Colorado. Governor Carr was one of the few governors that didn't say the Japanese were all bad.

BY: And so what kinds of things did you do with your...

HY: Well, we'd have parties and dances. But like I say, I was a bad dancer. But mainly I hung out with my friends like John Ishizuka and Bill Ito, things like that.

BY: And were there Japanese restaurants that you would eat at?

HY: Oh, yeah. But it was all down at Larimer Street and that's several miles away. We had to take the Number 8 streetcar and it would take us maybe an hour. Well, it would take half an hour or maybe an hour to get to downtown Denver. Because the University of Denver is towards the outskirts of town, so it wasn't easy to get to town. You'd have to take the streetcar and you'd have to transfer.

BY: Do you remember any kind of incidents of discrimination or racism or anything like that in Denver at the time?

HY: No, I don't remember any in Denver. Of course, you have to remember one thing, super remember, is that most of the Nikkei were extremely cautious. And very, very few of us... I only know one guy that would associate with the hakujin. So we were like the Hawaiians. We kept to ourselves, we talked to ourselves we entertained ourselves. We did everything, we did it ourselves. Because we didn't know how the public was going to treat us. So out of safety, we hung together, plus, we were all the same age, we were all college people. So the only person that I know that really had anything to do with how things were was a guy named Ken Sugioka. And he's the only one out of maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred Nikkei that I knew. Otherwise, all of our friends were Nisei.

BY: All right.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.