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Title: Elliot Yoshinobu Horikoshi Interview
Narrator: Elliot Yoshinobu Horikoshi
Interviewer: Patricia Wakida
Location: Emeryville, California
Date: April 6, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-503-13

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PW: Before we follow you to San Francisco, I want to pause in Florin with your whole family. Florin is well-known for having a pretty large Japanese American community. Can you describe what that was like when you went from Texas to Florin and saw, you caught up with your family again?

EH: Well, yeah. I didn't get involved much in the church at that time. As you may know, I went to church almost every Sunday until I was in high school. Once I started college, I didn't go to churches much, the services. So that continued after that for the remainder of my life. But then what happened was my folks left for, and I didn't realize this, but I just found out from reading some of the history that my sister gave me, that the church in Florin, the Japanese church in Florin, and then there was a Japanese church in Sacramento, and they decided to merged the two churches. But they felt, they didn't want the minister at either church to run the new church because they felt that would kind of, the other church would feel that if their minister's not there, so they thought they'd put in a new minister there to start the new church. And so that's when my folks took a job in Toronto, Canada, and so they moved to Canada. And then what happened then was my brother Peter was still in high school. Kathy was, I think, already in college at Berkeley, but Peter was still in high school. And he found out that in Canada, you don't go twelve years, you go thirteen years. [Laughs] That means you had to spend another year in high school wherever he lived, and he wasn't interested in that. So my folks asked if I could take Peter in. Because at the time I was living in San Francisco, I had an apartment, but then I decided to move to Berkeley and buy a house there and Peter could live with me and then go to Berkeley High School, so that's what happened. And so my folks moved to Canada and then I moved to Berkeley.

PW: And Kathy's at Berkeley, too?

EH: Yeah, Kathy's at Berkeley. And then she moved in with me, too. And for a while, well... then actually at that time, I also got married to my wife, so she entered the picture. But then my other sister Nancy already was married, but her husband was going to a seminary in Berkeley also. So they moved in with us, too, because the house that I had was large enough. And so we had everybody there for a couple years. So Peter finished up high school in Berkeley High, and then Kathy, she took a year off from Berkeley and went to college in Japan. [Interruption] (Kathy) learned her Japanese quite well over there because you have to if you're living there. And she learned a lot of the culture and traditions. So that's what happened there. And then Peter started college at Berkeley, and he lived with us for the... well, then he got into one of the dormitories on campus so he lived up there, but he was very close to us at that time, too.

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