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BN: And we'll get back to this, but I want to circle back now and talk about the Horiuchi side.

LH: Talk about... pardon me?

BN: The Horiuchi side.

LH: Oh the Horiuchi side, okay.

BN: Then we'll bring them together and then we'll get back to Denver.

LH: Okay.

BN: But yeah, tell me about your dad's family now.

LH: So my dad's family was actually from... oh yeah, that's right, my dad's family. So my Grandpa Nakata and Grandma Nakata were both from Shikoku, but my grandfather Horiuchi was from Chibu. So this is a whole different, sort of, cultural set, right? And they apparently had, Horiuchi apparently is a house on the moat by my mother's standards. [Laughs] Yeah, house on the moat, house on the ditch. She had these pretentions like samurai legacy and heritage, right? But apparently there is a real heritage there, that was a samurai heritage. And we visited the Onos in Japan, because my grandmother was, let's see, my grandmother's a Horiuchi and my grandfather was a yooshi, husband, right? So he took the Horiuchi name.

BN: He took on her name, right.

LH: And so they owned land there, which made them fairly wealthy already. So he immigrated from Chibu, and I don't really know much about my grandmother. My grandma Horiuchi, I don't know much about her past. I could ask, though, because now we have a second cousin in Japan who's really interested in the history. So he came later, like in 1900 or so. And same kind of thing, worked in agriculture, I think. I'm not really sure how he got established as a grocer, but that was fairly early on.

BN: And then this is in Seattle, right?

LH: In Seattle, yeah.

BN: Do you remember the name of the store?

LH: I can find it. So his most famous store was in the university area. What is that area right across the bridge from the university? It's like a residential area, very well-to-do. It's to the north of the bridge, you don't know? Okay.

BN: I'm from L.A.

LH: No, it was in that area. I can find it.

BN: Okay, that's fine. And then where was your father in the...

LH: Firstborn son. He was the firstborn son.

BN: Right. But there was an older, there was an older sister, then?

LH: Older sister, right, yeah.

BN: First son.

LH: He was the firstborn son, older sister was Chiye.

BN: Another Chiye? Or Chiye, Chiyo?

LH: Chiyo, my mother's Chiyo, she was Chiye.

BN: The sister was Chiye, right?

LH: And she had the classic responsibility of the girl-child for the family, so my father, and then there was a third child, Harold is the youngest boy and my uncle. And he got completely overlooked because my father got everything he ever wanted, he can go and play and he was in the tennis club, he was at University of Washington. He did very well, I think, at University of Washington. I know that he was like, he was a very smart man. And he was in... you'll see when you come to the house, I have these rolls of 1938 JACL, you know, meetings like the Japanese American Christian youth conferences and all of that. So they were like, my mother and father were like all the Nisei, they just sort of chose a church or religious affiliation. And then they had all of these, like, organizations that they worked with, and they had friends there, they would swap churches and things like that. But I think he was Baptist, my mother was not Baptist.

BN: But also Christian?

LH: But Christian, she was Christian. I don't know how involved, I don't' think she was involved with my grandmother's Buddhist church very much at all.

BN: And then so your dad was involved with JACL even from before the war then?

LH: He was a big JACL...

BN: I know after, but before as well?

LH: Yeah, even before. Because he was an older Nisei, he was born in 1916. So by the time of the war, he had already been out of school and graduated, he'd taken his trip to Japan. He was really, I think one of his big disappointments was that he couldn't serve in the war because he had bad eyesight.

BN: With many of these older Nisei who graduated college before the war, the occupational outlook is sort of dim because a lot of places just wouldn't hire Nisei. What did he end up doing after that?

LH: Well, he was like Min Yasui and Bill Hosokawa, they were like his best friends, and Bill Hosokawa ended up in Denver, too. But my father, I don't remember, I just know the story of the trip to Japan, then I don't know what happened in that hiatus between that and '42. And then he, they both went to Puyallup. He was in the advance crew at Minidoka, and then he got an educational leave to go to the University of Colorado. And then my mother joined him, I think, about that time she was already pregnant with my brother. And then they got thrown out of the program because the Japanese language school, one of them got moved to the University of Colorado, and they told him that they thought it would be a problem for him to be in the program, so they kicked him out of the program. I remember my father telling me that was one of the lowest points in his life because he had nowhere to go, he didn't know what to do at that point. So he was apparently selling pots and pans from door to door just trying to figure out how to scrap together a living for his new wife and himself. He ended up working in a company that built fine instruments, the Hathaway Company in Colorado and Denver. So when he moved there, he actually had some kind of decent job. And I don't know if he was doing accounting then or not, he probably was. And then after that, he just stayed in Denver.

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