<Begin Segment 18>

VY: So once you left public housing, did you all kind of maybe go your own way? Like did you stay in touch with any of the residents there?

DS: Yeah, yeah. I don't think my parents made a lot of friends. It was a time of reestablishing ourselves, my father got work repairing radios and now and then televisions. And he then, after buying his house, was a sole proprietor of a radio/television repair business, and that's how he supported the family. But all the while, my mother was extremely frugal. There wasn't much wealth in the family. Also there weren't very many Asians, I think there was one Asian and Japanese American family. And in order to buy rice and shoyu, soy sauce, we would have to drive to Chicago and buy our commodities, rice and soy sauce and the like. But the Protestant church played a very important role in our life. And we were members of several Baptist churches, Evangelical Christian churches, and that served as the focus of our lives all the while we lived in Milwaukee. So it continues the theme of my grandfather coming from Japan to practice his Christian beliefs, and ends up in Milwaukee as members of the First Baptist Church in Milwaukee.

But I think we can talk about the nascent Japanese American community in Milwaukee, but I can say that, in my high school class, in my high school, there was maybe one other Japanese American girl in my class. So we grew up in a predominately Caucasian, Germanic, Jewish environment. So we could have been in Berlin or Hanover or Frankfurt. And I studied German for four years. So it was very different than Seattle, very different from Eatonville, but my parents always felt comfortable in Milwaukee to the point where, in the early years after the war, there was always discussion of moving from Park Lawn back to Seattle. And we always decided not to move back, to cast our lot with Milwaukee and plant our roots there. There was one summer where we packed up everything, all the boxes were ready to go. And the night before we were to begin the move back to Seattle, my parents decided that we're going to stay in Milwaukee, that there was more opportunity, it was more welcoming than moving back to Seattle.

VY: Wow, that's so interesting, you got so close to leaving, and then...

DS: It was like a day before. And so we boys were growing up. Well, if we were going to live in Milwaukee, I guess we were going to live in Milwaukee.

VY: It's almost like your parents had decided that they were going to continue to move forward instead of going back.

DS: Well, I'm not sure what "moving back" meant. Maybe moving back to Seattle meant moving back to the old ways of being part of a extended, like a Japanese community in Eatonville. And maybe there was something that attracted, made it attractive to my parents to break away from that mould and try something new, especially in an environment that was so welcoming, without a sense of prejudice.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.