<Begin Segment 1>

PW: Today is April 15, 2022, we are in the office of the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner and founder of City Lights Books in San Francisco. My name is Patricia Wakida for Densho, and on camera we have Brad Shirakawa. Today I'm interviewing Paul Yamazaki. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. So let's just start with your immediate family and their background. First, when and where were you born?

PY: I was born 1949, April 17th, Cincinnati, Ohio.

PW: And what was the full name that was given to you when you were born?

PY: Paul Andrew Yamazaki.

PW: Tell me what your father's name was and where was he born?

PY: So, James Nobuo Yamazaki, Los Angeles. I don't know which hospital he was born in.

PW: Can you tell me anything about his parents, would have been your grandparents?

PY: So his father came over, John Misao came over in 1904, was in San Francisco for the earthquake. Took the bounty that was being offered to Asian Americans to leave San Francisco anywhere. So he came to Los Angeles, and he also had patrons, Caucasian patrons down there.

[Interruption]

PW: So your grandfather came to the United States, and he had a special occupation?

PY: He became an Episcopal priest. Family legend says he's the first graduate from, Japanese graduate from Yale seminary in New York, I forget the name, the specific seminary. His wife, Mary Tsune, so they're from Matsumoto. She was an orphan, and they were introduced by white Christian missionaries. And so he was here for ten years before Mary Tsune was able to immigrate, and they were actually, by that time he was an Episcopal priest and he was married here in San Francisco at Grace Cathedral.

PW: Did they have children besides your father?

PY: Eldest son John, who also became an Episcopal priest. My dad was the next, and then a younger brother, Peter, and then a sister Louise. So the family was kind of... both John and Peter were Goldwater Republicans, and James and Louise were, well, New Deal Democrats, I think, is the term. And even more extreme, they were Henry Wallace Democrats.

PW: And they were pretty much based in Los Angeles for the prewar period?

PY: Right.

PW: What neighborhood did they live in, do you know?

PY: Yeah, Uptown, so, like, Normandie and Olympic. And so that was... so my mother was raised in Boyle Heights, but they moved to about 27th and Hoover around, somewhere during the Depression, because she ended up going to Manual Arts instead of Roosevelt.

PW: Tell me, let's go to your mother. What was your mother's full name?

PY: Akiko Hirashiki. So Okinawans, her parents came from Naha, around Naha.

PW: And where was she born?

PY: She was also born in Los Angeles. There again, I don't know which hospital, but she was raised in Boyle Heights. So they were just up the slope from Evergreen Cemetery over on East First, and that's where both sides, Hirashikis and Yamazakis are all buried, or interred.

PW: Do you know much about her family?

PY: Her father was a wholesale produce grocer and he came over in 1911. Worked for a short time in San Francisco and also moved south to Los Angeles and became a very successful wholesale food broker, had a lot of connections with Terminal Island. And so he helped get provisions for incoming Japanese, both merchant and naval. So he was rounded up on December 8th.

[Interruption]

PW: And what about her siblings? Was it a big family?

PY: She had an elder sister, Teri, and a younger brother Jimmy. So Teri was already in New York by 1941, so she was not incarcerated. So the family was really split up. So Teri's in New York, her father is, I forgot which camp in Texas. He spent over a year there before he was reunited with the family. And they were at Manzanar.

PW: And what about the brother? The brother also went to camp?

PY: Yeah. So he was a teenager. So Jimmy, I think, had a good camp, like many of the teenagers did. He was able to be kind of very independent. But he ended up enlisting in the army. Never went overseas, because he was still really young, but he ended up in the occupation forces in Tokyo.

PW: Do you know when your mother was born, just to give me an idea?

PY: 1924. My dad was born 1916.

PW: So tell me what your mother's personality was like.

PY: She was quiet. Very supportive, just always kind of very artistic, that seemed to run in the family. Teri was a pianist at Juilliard. If she had been born at another time, she might have been more career-oriented. Her husband was Minoru Yamasaki, and so she ended up kind of raising the kids and teaching piano privately. We have some early recordings for her, and I'm no expert, but she was a very proficient and excellent pianist.

PW: So she moved to New York to go to school?

PY: Yeah, she went to Juilliard. So it shows you, kind of, the economic substance of the family at that point. In the middle of the Depression, they were able to send the two eldest daughters to college, and Teri to Juilliard.

PW: Do you know how she met Minoru Yamasaki?

PY: I don't know specifically, but there was a circle of Asian and Asian Americans in New York around that time, and (Isamu) Noguchi was part of that circle. And my mom eventually was on the outskirts of that when, after she left camp, and she went to New York.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

PW: So let's go back to your mom, we're in prewar Boyle Heights. So Executive 9066 was issued, her dad is picked up right away.

PY: Correct.

PW: Did the mother, did her mother have to take care of the kids and get them into camp?

PY: Yeah. So she had to do all that on her own, close down the house, whatever... I assume she had to do the business stuff, too, because there was, you know, he's gone just like that. So they had a big business, and how that was closed down, I actually don't know the specifics for that.

PW: And did you say that they went to Manzanar, your mother's side?

PY: Yes.

PW: Did she ever tell you any stories about that period, that experience?

PY: Not specifically of the camp. The war was pretty traumatic for her. So just in '44, she leaves her mother and her family behind, goes to New York, and fortunately Teri was there. Even by contemporary standards, how she married my dad was pretty remarkable, kind of like a weekend romance just before he ships out. They spent a few months together, she gets pregnant, she had German measles, my older brother was born with a congenital heart, so he's dead within months. And at the same time, my dad's missing his POW, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge.

PW: Let's back up again quickly about your mother. So when she went into camp, she was already in college?

PY: She was a senior at UCLA, and so she would have graduated that spring. And so she was one of those Japanese Americans who didn't receive their diplomas until fifty years later.

PW: And you said that her family was at Manzanar for about two years, so '42 to '44?

PY: Yeah, they were in there for the duration. Her father rejoins the... and I don't know if he had rejoined by the time, while she was still there, or whether he would join the family after she had left. Because I think she was in Manzanar for about maybe ten months.

PW: And then again, to clarify, she got out and went directly to New York and joined her sister Teri.

PY: Yes. And so like so many of that generation of Niseis, like the Quakers were really immensely influential in helping them get out. Like my Aunt Louise went to Carleton.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

PW: Let's switch over to your dad's side, because I know this is a complicated story. Fortunately, as we discussed, your father has already done an oral history for Densho. But let's go back to when he was growing up, you're saying in Uptown at this point? And he's got all these siblings. What happened, do you know what happened December 7th? Was the family deeply impacted by the immediacy?

PY: Yeah. So the family was always very aware of what was happening in the wider world. Like they'd been tracking the oil embargoes as Japanese aggression kind of increased through the '30s. His father, my grandfather, was kind of influential in J-Town and was one of the compradors between the Japanese American community and the larger community. And there again was kind of through the Flemings and the Episcopal church, and all the rest of that jazz. So they were, they saw this coming, they were very aware. My dad and my two uncles had enlisted in the army a year before, because my grandfather was pretty sure that this was what was going to happen, and that he wanted to make sure that the Yamazakis in particular, but the Japanese community were kind of showing their loyalty.

PW: And your father was also in college at the time, around 1941 or just finishing?

PY: He was just finishing and he was already, I think, at Marquette.

PW: So where did he go for his undergraduate?

PY: UCLA.

PW: Is that where he met your mother for the first time, do you think?

PY: Yes. So they were part of the Japanese American, she actually knew my Uncle Pete better, my dad's younger brother. Yeah, they were part of that whole pretty substantial group of Japanese Americans who were at UCLA at that time. Still feels like a family betrayal when any of our family goes to USC, for example.

PW: So when Executive Order 9066 was issued, what happens to your father's parents?

PY: Well, they start making preparations. They did as much as possible to try to stave off evacuation. I mean, that wasn't, evacuation wasn't a done deal. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Because they knew of the racism in the state and just kind of the general anti-Asian, anti-Japanese feelings just kind of, outcomes were not going to be good. So they, as much as possible, trying to prepare the community, in St Mary's parish, specifically what might happen.

PW: Because your grandfather had a whole congregation to care for. Do you know, by any chance, if it was one of those churches that provided shelter for people's storing of things?

PY: They did. And so particularly, just to jump ahead, became kind of, for the former parishioners and people, Japanese Americans in the neighborhood, just kind of a good landing spot where they could spend, if they needed to, if they didn't have housing, there was temporary housing there.

PW: It sounds like the children themselves were getting to be young adults. Your father, you said, had graduated from UCLA and was now enrolled at Marquette. Tell me about a little bit about this, and what is Marquette? What was he starting?

PY: So he was a medical student. Marquette, I believe, was one of the only very small handful of medical schools that accepted Asian Americans. And so there's a whole generation of Chinese and Japanese-descended doctors who were my dad's age, he was a hundred and five when he passed away, born 1916, who were all Marquette graduates. So a lot of the Japanese American physicians in Southern California, UCLA, Marquette, so there was that whole kind of fraternity there.

PW: Marquette is in Indiana?

PY: Wisconsin.

PW: Wisconsin. So he was not even on the West Coast when Pearl Harbor was bombed?

PY: That's correct.

PW: Interesting. So was he ever incarcerated in the camps, or did he stay...

PY: No, he was not incarcerated. He visited a couple, like he went to Rohwer a couple times where my grandparents were. Part of the congregation was in Arizona. So that whole west side community was split.

PW: So it sounds like your grandparents, though, went to Rohwer. Did they take any of their other children?

PY: Louise went to Rohwer.

PW: And how long were they incarcerated?

PY: They came out relatively early for Issei. So I think by maybe eighteen months in camp. But I'm pretty sure by the time my dad graduated from Marquette in early '44, they were out. They were in Chicago.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

PW: Okay. So your father is graduating almost the same time that camps are starting to close and things are definitely shifting. Did he meet up with his parents in Chicago?

PY: Yeah, I think he was able to see his brother John, and I don't know he ever, he saw his brother Pete, but he definitely saw the folks. And then after my parents were married, she ended up spending, leaving New York and spending time both in Cincinnati and Chicago with the Yamazakis.

PW: So by '44, he's just getting out and he's in Wisconsin. His parents are coming to Chicago, Aki is in New York. How did that eventually come together?

PY: Well, the family story is that my dad gets this graduation present, a portable traveling clock, and it had a New York mailing address. And so he made the assumption -- maybe this was wishful thinking on his part -- that, "Aki sent me this graduation present. How sweet." And that's not the story he tells in Densho. [Laughs]

PW: Has your mother corroborated the story?

PY: She said she was really surprised when he showed up at her doorstep. "What are you doing here?" Because she didn't know him that well. So he made the assumption, well, she must really like me because she sent this gift.

PW: But it kindled that relationship?

PY: Yeah. So this all happens in a very short period of time. So he's on leave, he's already in the army, assigned to a division, and is preparing to, the division was preparing to eventually be shipped overseas to Europe. And so she, couple different army bases as they're making their final preparations, and so all this stuff happens within, I think, the actual courtship is less than a week.

PW: Well, I also missed the part where your dad gets enlisted. So he's graduated, and then where does that happen?

PY: So he's already, they were enlisted before the war.

PW: Okay, you did say that.

PY: So he gets assigned to this new division. It's, just by coincidence, also the same division that Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, was in. So if people want to know about his experience during the Battle of the Bulge, read the first fifty or sixty pages of Slaughterhouse-Five.

PW: And it was brutal. We know that your father had a really trying experience in Europe.

PY: Very trying. And he never really spoke in full detail about that as much as I did research and talked to him about that. But for years, he resisted... or resisted is not the word, but he never took advantage of his veterans benefits. So it wasn't until the '70s or '80s that he finally registered with the VA. And that was because of, like, he started, he was doing research for his own book, Children of the Atom Bomb. Then he started going to reunions of his division, his military unit. And they all kind of said, "You're out of your mind."

PW: And your father was unusual because he also didn't join the 442/100th. It was a different division that he was put into.

PY: Yeah, the 106th. So it was one of those wartime divisions, slammed together, just a bunch of draftees and recruits, officers like my dad with no military training. Just slap a bar on your shoulders and salute.

PW: And he was doing medical work, though?

PY: Yeah, he was a battalion medical officer.

PW: And meanwhile, he had already proposed to your mother, right?

PY: Yeah. So before she left, and they had gotten married before they left. And so she spends several months with a near stranger going from military base to military base in mid-America, just away from family and friends and any sense of familiarity.

PW: And did they get married in New York?

PY: They got married in New York. So probably Teri and her husband were... and a couple friends from the American Service...

PW: And was there any family present at the wedding, either her family or his family?

PY: Outside of Teri and Min? No.

PW: And I meant to ask this question going back to Aki Hirashiki. Even though she was not incarcerated, or was there a very short time, what happened to her family? They were also incarcerated, you said, right?

PY: Yes. So the father, her father's in Texas, and rejoins the family after a year, just at Manzanar. And so they are one of the families that were in there for the duration. They didn't want to go, or I don't even know if it was offered to them, just because of his background, that he would get a release like a lot of families did.

PW: And what about mother and siblings? Again, you said that they went into the camp.

PY: Yeah. So Jimmy was in the camp, and so then so sometime in '45, he enlisted. And so I assume at that time he leaves.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

PW: I did mean to also ask you this other question that before your father's family left Rohwer, I know there was an incident, that your grandfather, the Reverend Yamazaki, was well-known within the community, but there was an incident that happens in Rohwer.

PY: Yeah, he was severely beaten. It was like... various levels of resisters, just kind of... so my grandfather was kind of, you would say probably leadership of people who felt their role as Japanese Americans was to totally support the American government despite the fact that they were all incarcerated in these concentration camps. And he was always vocal about that, and there was people who were vociferous on the other side of the thing, whether they felt that they were Japanese nationalists, which there were some, and then there were some people who just felt that their civil rights had been violated and were really pissed off righteously about that. So the "no-nos" had, there was like a lot of different currents within all the various "no-nos." So I'm not specifically clear which faction was responsible for the beating of my grandfather, but my dad did get, I think he got emergency leave to visit at that point. Because he did visit at that point after the beating.

PW: There was, it has been captured by the painter Henry Sugimoto. Have you ever seen that painting?

PY: I have seen that painting.

PW: I didn't know, I didn't put the two together until I read your father's oral history. So I'm going to skip back again to your parents had gotten married when your father... and she's still in New York, but you're saying that she's moving around to these different bases?

PY: Yeah. So they're married now, and so she's going where service brides often do, just kind of followed the flag, as it were.

PW: Right, and she couldn't bring family with her, so she's by herself.

PY: Yes.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

PW: Okay. I know I'm skipping so much, because your father's story is so devastating and long. He's captured, he's a prisoner of war. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

PY: Well, he goes into great detail at Densho. But what I will say is that the impact on the family -- because he was missing in action, family had no idea for several months whether he was alive or dead. My grandfather carried in his wallet, or on his person, for as long as I remember him pulling out and showing the telegram that he received saying that they had, that he was alive, that there was a record of this thing. So both for my mother and just like it, to me, that was just evidence of how big of an impact that had in their lives.

PW: When did he come home to the United States?

PY: So probably the summer of '45 because he didn't, there was a whole process of who got to go, because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people to try to come back from Europe to the United States.

PW: Was he injured at all during that whole ordeal?

PY: He's never laid claim to that, but once he registered with the VA, they researched his, all his records. And so I come home, visited Los Angeles, Van Nuys, at a certain point, there's a Bronze Star, Purple Heart that my mother made a display case for. And he wouldn't be specific about, because, "I don't know why they gave me his stuff." And I guess at some point I'm going to have to maybe go to get an FOI on him and see what papers exist. Because all those citations generally have some paperwork behind him saying why this was... but he would never say, "No, I wasn't wounded," "I don't know why I got a Purple Heart." "I don't know why I got a Bronze Star."

PW: So once your mother and father reunited, where did they settle down initially?

PY: Philadelphia. So that he was doing his residency there. He was at Philadelphia Children's and then later transferred to Cincinnati Children's.

PW: Was that about a year later maybe?

PY: Two years. I think they were eighteen to two years in Philadelphia.

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

<Begin Segment 7>

PY: So I was born in Cincinnati and I don't think they were there for more than eighteen months before he decided to accept a position with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.

PW: How did that come about?

PY: One of his mentors at Cincinnati Children's just knew of his interest in environmental medicine and knew that there was, like, the beginnings of this... that there was no pediatric nuclear studies whatsoever. And so he just thought this would be a good career opportunity for a young physician to be with my dad's interest in environmental issues. And so suggested that, and helped him get the job.

PW: And the job required going to Japan, correct?

PY: Yes.

PW: This is now a year or two...

PY: So this is 1949.

PW: '49. So it's several years after the bombs had been dropped, but there's devastating medical...

PY: The studies are just getting going, like nobody really knows very much at that time about what the long-term effects of a nuclear explosion is going to be, just like what the various levels exposure that people had.

PW: Do you know if your mother had a say in making this big move with a baby?

PY: In general, they were a very consultive family. So I'm assuming that she had a lot to say about that, but that she was also interested in going. So, I mean, because of Hiroshima, where he was originally going to work, was in the British zone of occupation. And the British would not allow or give housing to my parents because they were non-European, they were Japanese. And so obviously my dad was extremely pissed off. And so again, after, I guess, I don't know exactly when, but I'm going to say weeks of negotiation, then he took a position in Nagasaki. But my mother had English friends subsequent to all this, and they would sometimes have English-style holidays, and my dad was always pissed off about going to those things. It's not that he didn't like those individuals, but he remembered those things, and he felt that it was kind of overt racism.

PW: But they weren't supportive in Hiroshima?

PY: Yeah.

PW: Do you know what kind of housing they did settle into?

PY: Yeah, and he always felt badly about this, and he also speaks at great length in Densho about this, but in Nagasaki they didn't have housing so they kicked people out. So they had a, basically a palace, just something that, for a middle class Japanese American, seemed like, "Holy shit," just kind of nicely tended grounds, like shoji screens and mats and all over the place, just like, by my standards, with the photographs I've seen, that was pretty luxe. And it came with two young people to look after me, at least, two young, nice, Japanese women. My uncle Peter was in the occupation forces and so he was based out of Tokyo. And one of his suggestions to my father as they come over is buy a car, have it shipped over, make a, just be a statement kind of thing. So my dad didn't have the money, so this I didn't know, and this is the one thing that I actually didn't, that was new information to me in the Densho interviews, that Pete paid for that car.

PW: So it's an interesting... the word isn't coincidence, but it's interesting chance that both his brother and your father were in Japan at the same time. And your father, I'm kind of guessing, is on a regular work schedule going in to do research and studies on hibakusha.

PY: Basically he and the Japanese doctors have to invent this whole thing from scratch. I mean, there is no epistemology whatsoever about that, just in that... until my dad gets there, there had been very little activity on the pediatrics side. So most of it had been for adult survivors. And there have been no, kind of, looking at what are the possible long-term genetic things. And so that and their surviving Japanese doctors collaborated together and developed all these studies which are still kind of the foundation for long-term environmental effects, natal and pediatrics studies.

PW: And what about your mother? So you explained that there were two different people who were available to help take care of you during the day. Did she ever talk about the time in Japan and what that was like for her?

PY: She found that kind of isolating. Her Japanese wasn't that good and because they were part of an occupation force, even though they were Japanese ancestry, and that they had displaced somebody presumably pretty prominent within the community, because that was a nice residence. Then it wasn't easy for her, so like my dad's busy all the time, and just kind of... and she tends to be a shyer person.

PW: And her parents might have had family still in Japan, do you know?

PY: Okinawa.

PW: That's right.

PY: And so I don't know what the family experience was during Okinawa except we all know that it was, like, holy shit, they couldn't get this wartime experience and just kind of, no Okinawan who lived there at the time was, that was...

PW: Yeah, it was terrifying and brutal. So how long was this period that you were...

PY: About eighteen months. So we're there for the beginning of the Korean War. My mother was always sensitive to environmental... just weather really has a huge impact on her day-to-day well-being. The weather in Nagasaki did not agree with her and so she was having... that was the other reason why she was also isolated, because she was physically not feeling great during large portions of that. So because of, kind of, Korean War and then being in southern Japan, that was one of the closer access points to American fighter pilots are flying out of southern Japan, doing sorties out there. So anyhow, they came home. But a large part of it was, I think... my mother wasn't feeling really comfortable there, and spending another year was out of the question, basically.

PW: Well, I worry about all of you, too, because you're in a heavy radiation zone, too, throughout this time period, and your father is researching this.

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

<Begin Segment 8>

PW: So what year was this, then, that they returned to California?

PY: 1951.

PW: 1951. Did they go straight to Los Angeles?

PY: They came back straight to Los Angeles. And I realized that I'd never asked my parents, where did you live in the several months before you bought the house in Van Nuys? But I'm going to jump to buying the house in Van Nuys because that in itself is... my dad was at the School of Medicine at UCLA, which was still in a very embryonic state in the early '50s. And he wasn't, at that point, he was thinking more in terms of an academic and research career and not as a practicing clinician and pediatrician. But a colleague at UCLA said, "I have this house in Van Nuys, and you're looking for a place. Wouldn't you like to buy it?" And my dad said, "Yeah." It's a price that he can afford. And then his colleague came back and says, "People on the streets say they don't want you." My dad being my dad was really pissed off, and he says, he put his uniform on, and he literally knocked on every door on the block and says, "I'm the guy who's going to buy that house. Do you have an issue with that?" Nobody would cop to it, and so he never really liked being there, for understandable reasons. My mother got really attached to the house and the neighborhood and all that kind of stuff. And so he really never got attached to that, plus he was really busy.

PW: It sounds like, so he landed and immediately worked at UCLA and they got the house. So he's commuting to work in Westwood?

PY: Right. Driving over Benedict Canyon, there was no 405 in those days.

PW: Did both of your parents work at that time?

PY: No. My mother was a housewife and she also did not drive. And so to be in the suburbs of Los Angeles, she suffered a terrible traffic accident in the '30s where she was really severely injured and traumatized by it. She didn't actually get a driver's license until mid to late '50s. So we were always dependent when we wanted to go into town to see the dentist or anything like that. One of our neighbors was a chef on La Cienega and so he would drive us there and take a cab to where we needed to go.

[Interruption]

PW: So we're at the home in Van Nuys now, and I was curious if you could describe that house and what the neighborhood was like.

PY: So 1951 just kind of, like, was a tract house. And it was actually the only, there was only, there was only two blocks developed at that time. And so we could walk to the corner, and it was all agriculture. We could watch crop dusters.

PW: What were you growing out there?

PY: Corn, asparagus, wild asparagus like... so 1950s Los Angeles, back yard still had incinerators. And so in the San Fernando Valley, like in your specific block, maybe Tuesdays was your day. So there was always a pall of smoke because in different neighborhoods, that would be your day to burn. So this had all been agricultural land in the very recent past. And so if you walked out, there's a little door into these undeveloped fields. I believe a Chinese family had owned and farmed those lands. But the asparagus patches, those asparagus would come up every spring, and all the neighborhood ladies would go out there and harvest these now wild asparagus. So it was just an up the street, two blocks, there were people keeping horses and that thing. So it was still very kind of rural, undeveloped, and it was just the very beginning of that whole, that part of the valley because it was suburbanized.

PW: And what was the general makeup of the neighborhood ethnically? Working people are there?

PY: It was a combination of white, some Latinos, no African Americans, no other Asian Americans. The schools I went to reflected that same mix. So Van Nuys at that point was industrial working-class. The Chicanos on the family were kind of, like us, the first Latinos and pretty much, kind of a white working class. Fathers were working at, there was a GM plant, there was a Budweiser plant, there was Lockheed. And so kind of industrial elites, I would assume most of them were in unions at that point. But culturally conservative, nobody would cop to it, but kind of, elements certainly racially hostile. And so a few people that my dad was comfortable with on the neighborhood were Chicanos. They were kind of groundbreaking. But I think my dad was the only one that we would call a professional doctor and just everybody else had factory jobs. One of our neighbors was the first Chicano salespeople for Sears acquisitions, he was doing some sort of acquisitions for industrial parks or something like that.

PW: Both their parents came back to Los Angeles in the postwar?

PY: Correct.

PW: Was your mother's family back in Boyle Heights or did they go somewhere else?

PY: No, they moved out to, like, about Twenty-Seventh and Hoover before the war. So that's why my mom went to Manual Arts instead of going to Roosevelt. And they moved back to the same neighborhood. I don't know if they moved back to the same house, but there around that Twenty-Seventh and Hoover, as I said, was a big house and they had boarders.

PW: And what about your father's family?

PY: They moved back to Normandie and Olympic just to St. Mary's. And so for the first fifty years of St. Mary's, it only had Yamazaki. So my uncle John was the assistant rector, and the rectory was large, and so he had, John and his family had part of it and my grandfather and grandmother and my aunt Louise had the other part.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

PW: And at that point in time in the '50s, did the family grow in terms of, you had siblings, your parents had more children?

PY: My sister Kathy was born three years after myself, and then my sister Carol was born seven years after Kathy. Then my uncle Pete and my aunt Joy, my dad's younger brother, Uncle Peter, they had five kids, so I had a lot of cousins and that's why we spent more time with the Yamazakis. And John and Fumi, they also had three children. So Jimmy was younger and Teri was in Michigan. So for a young person, cousins were the gravitational point of family, at least for me it was. And so there were no, really cousins of my age on the Hirashiki side. My mom's mom just made the best inarizushi. So whenever we went to visit, one of the high points was I knew there would be this big platter of inarizushi waiting for us. My grandfather Hirashiki was very quiet. He used to play a lot of go with one of the tenants, boarders, which, at least from a kid's point of view, seemed more interested in playing that go game than the fact that these noisy grandchildren were there.

PW: I'm not surprised. And what about just, it sounds like you were doing gatherings regularly, either your mom's side or your dad's side. So were you still going to the same church? Was that also a regular part of your childhood?

PY: No. My dad, being a preacher's kid, had his belly full. And also, at that time, transitioned out of academic, he thought the institutional racism was going to be a real issue and problem. And so he thought being a practicing pediatrician would be more stable. And there was obviously a need in postwar Los Angeles. So he opened an office on Crenshaw and Olympic, staffed all by the Niseis or the oldest of the Sanseis were nurses and secretaries, great group.

PW: What year was this that he opened the private practice?

PY: It must have been around '55.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

PW: This is the beginning of the rise of Crenshaw as a pretty solid Japanese American hot spot.

PY: Right. And so he was in that building for about ten years and then moved a little further south into this, just slightly up the hill from the Holiday Bowl on the west side of Crenshaw, there was a whole large development with medical buildings and office buildings� and moved his office into there.

PW: Did your family do shopping or hang out around that neighborhood or the district much?

PY: Only to visit family. I used to make house calls with my dad. He put on about... until he retired, he did house calls. He put on about thirty thousand auto miles a year. And so I got to know L.A. fairly well, we just kind of...

PW: Were there other community types of things that you guys did, did you go to, like, I don't know, picnics or Obon?

PY: We went to church picnics in the St. Mary's... so most of it was Yamazaki-related, St. Mary's related. And so my image of the Japanese American community at that time is that all Japanese Americans were Episcopalians, they were all doctors and dentists, and they all knew my uncle and grandfather. So I had a very limited sense of what that was. And so our activities were almost all family-related, mostly around the Yamazaki family, but we did not go to church on a regular basis. And so we showed up on the high holy days, Christmas, Easter, whatever. Partially my dad was busy and partially he kind of had his belly full. I never asked him why Van Nuys. Was that just kind of what... availability? Because a lot of their friends, they had gone to UCLA or had been part of the St. Mary's thing, ended up in Silver Lake. A few went down to Gardena, but Silver Lake was really kind of just a lot of the old St. Mary's folks that Mom and Dad went to UCLA with, and just ended up around Silver Lake.

PW: What was the general feel for the Japanese American community at that time? Because, again, the Sansei are starting to come of age. I'm kind of curious, what did it feel like in L.A. at that time, particularly this community?

PY: Just... I'm the grandson, so we're fucking spoiled. It's just like, just so... and come out in these ridiculous ways. So we don't go over there very often -- my cousins, some of them lived there, others, like Pete brought and Joy brought their kids every...so they were part of that community. I knew my cousins, and that was just about it, and some of the other family friends. But the Yamazaki grandkids, all the kids would get these Easter baskets, our Easter baskets were twice as big. It was kind of like, what? [Laughs]

PW: Did your family also still celebrate things like Oshogatsu or things that were...

PY: My mother did not... my Auntie Joy was an amazing cook, and she did amazing Oshogatsus. I think one of the reasons why she liked me is because I ate whatever she cooked. And my cousins, when they were kids, didn't like that traditional Japanese food. And so I think it really... because you know how much preparation goes into, that's like three or four days of straight work and prep days before that to get ready for that three days of intensive cooking. And so I think Joy was hurt by the fact that the kids didn't appreciate all that work and just... not that I was that appreciative of that, but I was just a chowhound. You put food in front of me, I was going to eat it, and a lot of it. [Laughs] But it was really good. And I just, over the years I got to appreciate it more and more. And as did my cousins eventually, but in our family, the unfortunate thing is that none of us would know how to recreate or even begin to recreate what Joy did at Oshogatsu, which is really unfortunate. So that particular line of food and cultural transmission went with Joy, just because none of us were quite together enough to really sit down with her and at least get the rudiments of what it would take to put together a meal like that.

PW: I'm kind of curious to hear just more about, like, what you did for fun. Like what were, especially first when you were a child, were there games that you were especially into?

PY: It was like a suburban... I mean, kids were pretty free outside of, like you grew up in the suburbs, everybody, there was only a couple blocks at that time, and so there wasn't that many places you'd go to, and you ran around the streets with, like, the neighborhood kids, and you went home when you got hungry. But as you get older... so everything was in walking distance. The grammar school was about a mile away, and just after first grade, you walked every day. My big decision every day, was I going to spend the quarter for lunch money on the doughnuts and go hungry at lunch?

PW: Tell me the name of the elementary school that you attended?

PY: It was Gault Street. Gault Street elementary in Van Nuys. I thought you were going to... I know the name of the doughnut shop.

PW: Tell me the doughnut shop.

PY: June Ellen's.

PW: And what was your favorite doughnut?

PY: Chocolate. But days I was a little bit smarter, I'd get a dozen doughnut holes for like a dime or something like that, and be able to stick that in my bag and sneak them out during the course of the day. Most times I'd just get a chocolate doughnut and be hungry for the rest of the day. It would be gone by the time I got to school.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

PW: So all three of you kids were all at school roughly around the same time, right? The youngest was much younger.

PY: Yeah, ten years.

PW: But you and Kathy were...

PY: Yeah, so she was three years younger, so we were in the same school. And then the next junior high school, we were the last six year school in the Los Angeles School District, Birmingham, it was an old military hospital. And so for five years, it was like seven through twelve, which was unusual. The L.A. school district at that time, I think we were the last ones that had that. Ninth grade we went to a separate, one year separate thing. So I spent five years at that school. And for a seventh grader, the twelfth graders seemed like another universe.

PW: And you described the racial makeup was similar to the neighborhood?

PY: Yeah, what changed it at Birmingham was that included a wider geographical. So as a six-year school, I think the student population was about four thousand. So it encompassed not just Van Nuys, but also Encino, and so that changed the class composition as well as the racial. So the neighborhood itself was predominately white working class. Encino introduces upper middle class professional and highly Jewish, and pretty well-established. So, like, the student parking lot, they just had a lot of late model Thunderbirds and Mustangs, and even one fucking XKE, pardon the language. As a kind of young adolescent Southern California male, most of us were car obsessed. I can still see a tail light of a 1962 Falcon and say, "That's a 1962 Falcon." I couldn't identify a recent car, but I still kind of get excited when I see a 1959 Chevy Bel Air.

PW: And what kind of kid were you at that time? Like you're between, let's say, junior high school and high school?

PY: You wanted to be accepted. I was feeling uncomfortable, like, "What are you?" question that we all got. Kind of like, "What are you?" The intonation of that one question and how, who was asking, how they kind of said that set off different degrees of uncomfortability, but it was always uncomfortable. But just in my standard response, "Well, I'm a fucking American." And so, like, some people would kind of query you more on that stuff. As I got a little bit older, just in junior high school, it wasn't infrequent to have a fight on December 7th. And I was really terrible at stuff and do this... it wasn't really a close friend, but this guy named Howard Swerlof, he was really very bad at this shit, you know it's coming. So he was kind of a tough guy, he gave me this... "You need something that will help you." So he gave me this sawed off baseball bat that his brother had kind of countersunk a lead weight into. So it had a little bit of heft, so it was about twelve inches. And so I used that one time, and then I guess I got lucky, hit the kid on the head, and that was the end of it. I never, that was the end of the Pearl Harbor fights.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

PW: All right. So I was asking the question about whether your family was active in the Los Angeles Boy Scout scene.

PY: St. Mary's had a very active... St. Mary's and All Saint's church that my grandfather and uncle were rectors of had a very active Boy Scout troop. My grandfather felt it was real important to kind of bring the Nisei in, just to, that Scouting would be a good way to do that. So my dad and both my uncles were not just Boy Scouts, but eventually became Scoutmasters of that troop, I don't remember what the number of the troop was. They spent their whole adolescences as part of the St. Mary's Boy Scout community and the leaders of that said community. So it was expected of the Sansei to do that. My cousin Mark, who's John's eldest son, was academically great all-state gymnast and an Eagle Scout. So I was the first member of the family who was a Boy Scout who did not attain an Eagle Scout status.

PW: But you did join it; you were part of the troop at some point?

PY: A different troop out in the valley. Which I... to me, the Boy Scouts were kind of this safe zone where I could be myself. You didn't have the issues of race and just basically our troop was a makeup of all valley outcasts for various reasons.

PW: What ages were you involved in Boy Scouts?

PY: Probably twelve to sixteen.

PW: So this is about the same time we're talking about, junior high school, transitioning to high school. What was the name of the high school you attended?

PY: Birmingham High School.

PW: That's right, Birmingham High School. And were there any particular teachers you remember who were an influence, good or bad?

PY: No. I was a really terrible student, to the chagrin of my parents. My cousins were, all my cousins were academically good, and it was just like part of the homecoming queens and all that kind of stuff. I was a terrible student, and to the great stress of my parents, my mother's great ambition, crowning achievement for her, if I had an endowed chair at UCLA.

PW: That was your dream?

PY: That was her dream. I was such a poor student that decades later, my high school tenth grade English teacher happened to walk through the doors of City Lights and saw me working there. I was such a poor student that he actually remembered my name. And he explained, "Yamasaki, you work in a book store? This book store?" And he couldn't fucking believe it.

PW: Did you have super good friends? Did you have close friends in high school?

PY: The people I was closest to were in the Boy Scouts.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

PW: And what kinds of things did you guys do for fun? Would you go to the movies?

PY: No. Once I was sixteen, just like... I pretty much insisted that I wanted to make my own pocket money, so I had a series of part-time jobs. So I ended up working for the last two years in high school at a place called Ah Fong's in Encino, which was run or owned by Benton Fong, who was a prominent Chinese American actor. Most notably -- at least in my universe, and you had a different... was that he was Warren Owen's number one son in the Charlie Chan series.

PW: What made you decide to go work there?

PY: I literally walked up and down Ventura Boulevard, that was kind of the major commercial strip closest to us that had a lot of restaurants. And just kind of walked... I wasn't specifically looking for a job at Ah Fong's but that's the place that ended up hiring me. It turned out to be a pretty good place to work because management was, we'll say, tolerant of a lot of behaviors. And it gave me pocket money, and my dad's father gifted me his car, it was a 1956 Bel Air Chevy. Which I thought it was an old car at that time, but it was only eight years old at that point, or ten years old, whatever. But it gave me the freedom to go after work. That was the other thing about this. Like I worked on Friday and Saturday nights and so you get off at nine or ten. Oftentimes I would head over the hill to Los Angeles and most frequently to a place called the Ash Grove.

PW: I know that music has been a lifelong passion for you, and I'm kind of curious, what was that soundtrack in your mind of your childhood, from the point that you really started becoming conscious of music. And now you're at the point where you're going to Ash Grove all the time to go...

PY: The reason why Ash Grove was just slightly before then, I'm doing household chores around on a Saturday, and I'm pretty much the typical Top 40 kid, you know, that's kind the extent of my musical knowledge. But I just happened to have on this FM radio station that day, had this radio on playing loudly. And they were playing... the DJ, and I'm trying to find, actually, I haven't been able to find the name of this DJ. He was doing American roots music with an emphasis on the blues. But the specific cut that he was playing that kind of, like, really opened my head up and what became a lifelong passion was Paul Butterfield's "East-West," and he was still playing that long cut where... so that was an amazing introduction, and it was followed up by this same DJ. I think, playing basically everybody that Willie Dixon produced for Chess Records. So that's Muddy Waters, that's Howlin' Wolf, that's James Cotton. Just the whole stable as well as Willie himself, and they all played at the Ash Grove, as well as a great variety of other American roots music. So I saw Sonny & Brownie there, John Hurt, Doc Watson. So I'd get there for, kind of like, I guess, late set, and just come home. And the other fortunate thing about that, even if I didn't stay long there, there was a place called Canters', good Jewish deli where you could get pastrami. And the thing about Canters', although I couldn't take advantage of it at that time, is it's one of the few delis that had a full bar, which I did take advantage of later in life.

PW: Did you date in high school during this time?

PY: No.

PW: Not at all.

PY: No, not at all.

PW: Were you starting to collect vinyl at this point, too?

PY: Barely. Just started... I think when I left for San Francisco, I had a couple Ray Charles things, I had a couple, Frank Zappa. But I didn't spend a lot of money on vinyl at that point. The last thing I did with the money I had earned was I bought a little portable stereo, but continued to kind of, like, add stuff and spend time in record shops. I probably spent more time in record shops than bookstores.

PW: Was there a favorite place that you liked to go?

PY: No, but it was, I mean, the Ash Grove was really the thing that I felt most fortunate about, I'd been really fortunate. So when I came up here and started working at City Lights, one of the last of the classic jazz clubs was just two blocks away, Keystone Korner's. So I'm working on Saturday nights by myself, and it wasn't uncommon to see Max Roach comes in between sets, Cecil Taylor would come in between sets. Because it was just two blocks away, and so clubs in those days, and particularly Keystone was really music oriented. And the sets would be long or short depending on how the musicians were playing. So I got to spend a lot of time there. And people that I've worked with for over forty years here at City Lights, Scott Davis specifically, were, on the basis of we were people who were music enthusiasts, hanging out there and got to see each other frequently.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

PW: So before we move out of Los Angeles and come to San Francisco, I'm kind of curious, did you feel any changes in Los Angeles around that time, just developing?

PY: Well, just adolescence. Well, the valley is filling in and getting busier and busier. I didn't know why I was discontent, or didn't like it there, but I knew that I wanted out. I didn't know what, out to, but the only horizon I had was kind of the music I was listening to, but that was the only thing that distinguished me from any other kind of suburban, middle class kid. Because I didn't really have a sense of myself as a Japanese American despite my family. I was unsuccessfully trying to fit in to this very, kind of, middle class, mostly white. Like there were no African Americans at this school of over four thousand, just a handful of Chicanos. For many years, I think I was the only Asian American there. And so it's not that I rejected that, I did want to become... but I was very unsuccessful. And so my social home was the Boy Scout troop. And it wasn't until I got up here that I discovered that there was this great diversity among the Japanese American community and a lot of interesting people. I was really fortunate coming up when I came up under the circumstances.

PW: So tell me about it. What year did you arrive?

PY: '67. So I'm just right there on the cusp of everything, having no idea of what any of that stuff meant. So I arrive in San Francisco late summer, early fall of 1967, when the national media had been blowing up about San Francisco and the Haight specifically. But I was really fortunate to go to San Francisco State because it was known as a commuter school, had a much greater diversity of, not just racially, but class-wise. I think one of the reasons why the San Francisco State strike was one of the longest strikes, student strikes in American history was because of that diversity of experience and backgrounds. We had African American leadership that had, some of them had gone through the military, some had gone through the military as well as organized in Alabama and Mississippi during Freedom Summer. There was a lot of community activism among the Chinese and Filipino communities that had been organizing and teaching in Chinatown. So it was a great hub of really conscious Third World activity. And I just stumbled into all that stuff, and it just kind of, with no conscious intention. So you come to San Francisco in 1967 and you just kind of, for me, learning what to live in a city is like.

Even growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles is... because Los Angeles is so large and the suburban things, you kind of know what you know. You go from point A to point B. I was fortunate I knew a little bit more, because I used to make house calls with my dad. And because of where my parents grew up and where our various family friends were, you got to know a little bit more of Los Angeles, but it was still very limited. But you didn't have the urban experience of being able just to walk around and stumble into stuff the way you do in the city. And that's what happened to me. And just, I think, a key example of that, I'm walking around what eventually became Ghirardelli Square, but still, it was an abandoned chocolate factory at that point with a commercial strip beneath that. There was a little movie theater, there's aquatic park. But anyhow, slightly abandoned, slightly tourist, the cable car ends there. Somebody doesn't know the city, San Francisco specifically, and cities in general, I'm just wandering around there.

I get handed a leaflet by this young woman who I thought was very attractive, and it was a benefit for the Black Panther Party for a screening of the Battle of the Algiers at the Surf Theatre. I didn't know what the Black Panther Party was, I didn't know what the Battle of Algiers was. So I took the leaflet and went to that benefit on the hope of maybe seeing that young woman, which I didn't see, but David Hilliard was there, Bobby Seale was there, large presences of [inaudible], left at that point, was at this event. It must have been shortly after Huey and Bobby had gotten into their difficulties with the Oakland police. And so for a young person just to be able to dip their toes into this, that was an amazing first exposure.

And just to back up a little bit, I'm playing high school B football in high school, I was politically... I was much more politically conservative than my parents. My parents saw very clearly where Vietnam was going, and the American involvement in Vietnam was, they were highly opposed to that. And I was at one point considering enlisting, which obviously upset my parents a great deal. Eventually I didn't do that, but I had friends that I'd played football with who had enlisted. So I had, despite my family background, when I came up here, I had no real disposition about, I didn't think of myself as a liberal, despite all my exposure to all those various music at the Ash Grove, that hadn't changed me or moved my politics at any point. Just a couple people I was acquainted with in high school knew I was going over there, and so they invited me to the Pete Seeger concert, and I thought that kind of, "What the fuck is this shit?"

So it was an amazing, very rapid changing of political views, just the one... to this day, I really can't fully explain it, but I decided that I would not register for 2S (Student Defensemen), and that I would remain 1-A. There again, this is probably, even though I wasn't conscious of coming out of a family background of, particularly my parents, of fairness. I couldn't articulate it at the time, I can barely articulate it now, what seemed unfair just based on class circumstance that I'd be exempt from going to this war, and somebody who was in a different situation would have to go to this fucking war. So anyhow, my parents weren't happy about that either, because they rightly sensed that I didn't know what I was doing. But it was through this whole process that I began to understand, okay, I didn't know what I doing, but that's not actually a bad decision. And what I'm learning with the people that I became acquainted with, that I would, even if I did get drafted, I would be able to kind of resist fight, kind of work the system and not end up in Nam.

PW: When you came to San Francisco, were you already planning to enroll at State?

PY: Yeah, I came up specifically --

PW: Did you have a place to land, or did you just drive the Bel Air down the road?

PY: No, I'd come specifically to go to San Francisco State. Miraculously accepted there, because my SATs were terrible, my GPA from high school was not good. Coming from a middle class Japanese American family, it's like... this is about as big a screw-up as you could have. My plan particularly was so UCLA-centric, UC-centric, just like... they were kind of semi-happy that I was getting to, because I wasn't going to go to junior college, which would have been really, from my mother's point of view, a family disgrace. I was going to school in a city period, any of these, Santa Clara or anything like that. It was nothing against, or any of those schools, because I wanted to be in a city. I wanted to be out of, like, the suburbs. I had no idea what being in a city meant at that point, but it had to be different and better, which it turned out to be really...

PW: Right.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

PW: I mean, you're describing again, not only the city and proximity of the walking and the coincidences that could happen. But not only what's happening in the larger picture of the war, right across from the East Bay, you got political uprisings with the Black Panthers and a very righteous movement moving in. How does that come down at San Francisco State? What's happening at San Francisco State?

PY: Well, all those things, San Francisco State is one of the central hubs of that, and maybe I'm being parochial, but even in a certain way, more substantial than was happening in Berkeley. But Penny Nakatsu had, in the summer of '67, had attended the conference at Berkeley where Asian American Alliance was formed. And she came back to San Francisco, was the one who formed the chapter at San Francisco State, and that really is the beginning of, first, kind of, my serious understanding of myself as a Japanese American, Asian American. Because that's where I meet Francis Oka, George Leong, Stan Wong, Miyo Ota. And eventually through that connection, people, Janice Mirikitani and Neil Gotanda, but AAPA was the, even though Neil and Janice weren't students, they were all kind of members of AAPA.

PW: Tell me a little bit more about some of the people you just named. Let's start with Penny, tell me what you know about her and how did you two actually meet beyond the organization?

PY: Well, that was, AAPA, although it was pan-Asian, the nucleus was Japanese American. Part of that was that, the reason why that was is that Japanese American of the Asian American students were the last to be organized. The Chinese American and the Filipino Americans had their own organizations. And Japanese Americans, I guess, you could call us at that point unaffiliated. And so the core group, initial core group of AAPA at San Francisco State was Japanese American, Sanseis And Penny was kind of the leader of that. The politics of the Third World at that time, and the politics of progressives of all stripes was... one of the negative things that was shared in common was the sexism. You could call yourself a cultural nationalist, you could call yourself a Communist, you could call yourself a Troskyist, whatever. But what was common to all those, people would argue all those points vociferously, those differences. But what bound them all together was, for the males, was the sexism. It was just kind of egregious, and it was shared by anybody in leadership and most of the rank and file. So Penny suffered from that, and so she was on the central committee of the Third World Liberation Front which was the organizing group where all the various ethnic and cultural organizations had formed a political bond to fight for the College of Ethnic Studies and to kind of hire more faculty of color, and also to kind of bring in more students of color. This was the last gasp of the Johnson administration, you know, Pew programs, economic. And so all these organizations had done this intense work over the previous several years of going into the high schools and whether it's Bayview, Hunters Point or the Mission or Chinatown, to prepare students who might not have thought about college or thought that college was an opportunity for them, say that, "There's money here for you, there is this program, and we can bring you in in a way that's not going to be totally alienating and help you go through these things." And this was grassroots work done by the Black Students Union and ICSA, which was the Chinese and the Filipinos and the various Latino organizations. In San Francisco, because the difference for the San Francisco Japanese community rather than Southern California, there was less class diversity.

I didn't realize this until much later, but just my very, kind of myopic experience at St. Mary's, like I had said earlier, that I thought all Japanese Americans were Episcopalians and professionals. But over time, I meet all these people who, kind of like, Japanese Americans who grew up in South Central, who grew up on the east side, and were clearly Japanese American but also culturally had bonded with a Latino identity or African American identity, and that was kind of the... there was no equivalent to the Yellow Brotherhood up here in any organized way. There was a couple individuals like the Kanzaki brothers who ended up working more in Chinatown than J-Town. But for the majority of Washington High School, twelve, that was much more middle-class oriented. And so for the Southern Californians who came up here, one of the differences is that, particularly for the Southern California Buddhaheads who were more working class, and they felt that San Francisco, particularly the Washington High School kids, were verbally un-adept, but they couldn't defend themselves, and people were always capping on each other.

PW: You mentioned Yellow Brotherhood. Were you involved at all in Yellow Brotherhood in L.A.?

PY: No. I didn't get to know those folks until much later, like after I was clearly part of the San Francisco Asian American movement. And then there was a lot of back and forth between Southern California and Northern California. There again, there was another music bridge there, getting involved in the Asian American music community. We got to know people from all those communities. So that kind of reconnected me to Southern California and to people working at Little Tokyo at that time, Gidra and YB. Mas Kodani working down in South Central, and various jazz groups as well as people looking at taiko and gagaku and all those.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

PW: All right. So then I think I want to go back to San Francisco State specifically, 1967. What happened in 1967 at the college?

PY: So I'm enrolled in a program called Freshman Program of Integrated Studies, run by Edward Kauffman. So I really wasn't on campus that much because our classrooms were on downtown San Francisco on Powell Street in California. I was living in the dorms at that time on campus, and I was also working in the student cafeteria. So the first year up here, or the first six months, I'm still very, maybe transforming politically, but in terms of an Asian American or Japanese American consciousness, not so much. And so I'm slowly... so those first six months, I'm in this freshman program, just kind of class and racially, I had kind of grown up most of my life, mostly white. It wasn't until the beginning of the strike that there would, the summer before the strike, through Stan Wong who was in the dorms, I meet George Leong. And I think it was George who said, "You should come to this meeting of AAPA." "What's AAPA?" So in some ways, I'm out of synch with myself. Before I'd gone to an AAPA meeting, I had spent time at Stop the Draft week in Oakland, and I had participated in that. I was arrested during the Stop the Draft week. So I'm just beginning to kind of... the formation of, like, an Asian American consciousness just beginning. My opposition to the war is more developed than thinking of myself as a person of color, as an Asian American. And there again, because status had that diversity of experience, just like the music thing, it was so transformative. There was a meeting, I was working on the job, but there was a pre-strike meeting held by the BSU in a space adjacent to the student union. So I have my work garments on, and I went there to listen, I was curious. And then a certain point, somebody from the BSU leadership asked all the white people to leave, and I started to leave. And it was Terry Collins, who was part of the BSU leadership, he said, "Where are you going, Brother? You could stay. You're one of us." And it was really one of those, "Holy fuck," because I was leaving. And so all these things, it was right around that time, I was introduced to the folks at AAPA.

PW: Is that where you met Francis Oka?

PY: Francis? Yeah, it's like the first meeting, Penny Nakatsu, Miyo Ota, Jane Tabata, Francis Oka. I already knew Stan and George, they had been attending meetings before. It was a small group, and it was Penny who really was able to outline why we're there, what we were trying, attempting to do. And we didn't have a, AAPA was the low people on the totem pole, we didn't have the prior experience. We were a new organization, we didn't have the programs that all the other organizations had. That, combined with the sexism, always put Penny in a difficult position relative to the rest of the TWLF leaderships. We were complicit in kind of undermining Penny. Not intentionally, but Francis, George and I had all been approached by other members of other Third World organizations, that maybe you should start attending these meetings. In retrospect, I know they were trying to push Penny out. The leadership was all male at that point. None of us, neither George, Francis, or I had any business being there. Penny was always really clear. She's still one of the best people to talk about the experience of the strike and what that meant, and just what the Japanese American, Asian American participation. And so but it was, it was kind of the tenor of the times, that I'd be really interested to hear what she has to say about that. The state has done some work in terms of developing an oral history archives of the strike participants. But the people, graduate students who have been talking formally about this, doing research on this, I know that in my conversations with them that it's a subject that hasn't been brought up, and in some cases, I've been the first person to bring it up, the sexism that happened within the Third World Liberation Front at the time of the strike. Nobody's really kind of referred or kind of mentioned that there was a strike within the strike. The women stopped and said, "Fuck you guys." So in the middle of the struggle, people are getting arrested, all sorts of things, they had finally said, "Enough is enough," going to do a work stoppage. And their demands were so little, I mean, it's embarrassing to think about it. Just show up on time, be semi-polite. I don't know exactly how that was resolved, people went back to work. Just like in so many things, it's no surprise that women were crucial to keep that strike going. Just all the things that needed to be done. To keep any sustained operation going, we were largely organized by women.

The thing that I participated most in was getting people out of jail. So after all the activities, there would be arrests all the time. Part of our job was to kind of, this was organized by a woman named Margaret Lahe out of SDS. But I spent a lot of time at the end of the days at Barrish Bail Bonds, because that became our headquarters for seeing who got arrested, what condition they were, and getting them out of jail as quickly as possible. Jerry was this young progressive bail bondsman, and made minimal guarantees in terms of the bail procedures. In my case, when I got arrested, he would just come and get me.

PW: Well, back up. For somebody who doesn't even know what the Third World Liberation Front strike was, can you give us a brief definition?

PY: Yes. The strike emerged out of, like, students of color feeling that their histories, cultures, and needs were not being met. And it would be incumbent upon them to shape a program. And so this was, like, not just students, but faculty also. And so this didn't just rise out of the ground in a short period of time. This had been years of work , which I hadn't been around for. But they had been organizing in various communities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. But the college was not exclusive on a class basis and what people learned in college, the skills that they picked up there would be, in some ways, shaped by the needs and histories of various communities. And several of the people who had, who were in leadership had many years of prior political experience. And all of them had, at that point that I got there, years of community organizing experience. And so many people were closely connected to the Black Panther party. George Murray, who was the Minister of Education, was also on the central committee of BSU. So all these relationships were really tight. So much of what happens subsequently in the Mission, in the Fillmore and Hunters Point, and J-Town and Chinatown are shaped by all these years of prior experience that then comes, crystalizes at San Francisco State during the strike. Wanted to kind of develop a College of Ethnic Studies to bring in more students of color. People of color helped define their own curriculum. That's also, for all these people with understanding of what's happening internationally, and particularly with the war in Vietnam, it's also something that ties into the history of people of color here. The demands that we're developing are also the demands of solidarity with just, whether it's happening in Asia or Latin America or in Africa. So it was felt as a very internationalist, part of an internationalist movement.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

PW: You mentioned that students were getting arrested during this drive when they shut down the college, effectively, and that you were arrested. You also had this experience of being arrested at the Stop the Draft. Can you tell us about both of those experiences?

PY: Yeah. So Stop the Draft just, that becomes... all this is happening within months. So Stop the Draft is October of '67. I'm here less than sixty days, or ninety days. I'm living at the dorms at San Francisco State. Nobody that I knew in the dorms expressed interest in going, so I took a bus across Oakland very early in the morning. I actually fell asleep and ended up in Alameda, and I had to walk back. [Laughs] So I get to downtown Oakland a little bit late, just kind of... but for two days, just kind of like my first political experience was like shutting down downtown Oakland. Just being exposed to that kind of wide range of political experience. So inexperienced kid sees somebody getting arrested, and in an unusually physical way, and I tried to intervene. Stupid on my part, but anyhow, I was arrested. Spent a couple days in jail there, then you're out and then you await trial.

PW: You mean Oakland police?

PY: Yeah. And so I end up getting convicted and then doing, what, ten or twelve days in Santa Rita several months later. So these were all interesting and transformative things for a middle class kid from San Fernando Valley. And at that point, people who were incarcerated, mostly African American and Latino and white, had no experience with Asian Americans period. I mean, just like, "What the fuck are you?" And so Asian Americans are so unfamiliar that my first couple times in jail, before they knew my name, they called me Chief because they thought I was... the closest thing they could identify was to indigenous or Native American. So all that changes rapidly within just a year, year and a half later, spent a couple years in the legal justice system. Bruce Lee had hit the consciousness of young people of color. So, like, I'm in City Hall, and one of my colleagues there just kind of tries to pass me off as his bodyguard. Oh, my fucking god. [Laughs] Just for the simple fact that I'm Asian, right? Just, "That's my bodyguard." "What the fuck are you doing?" Just going to get me in a shitload of trouble. Fortunately, it never came to that.

So Santa Rita, must have been, done my time in the spring of '68, ten days... I didn't have a place to live, but I had a friend from, once again from the Freshman Program of Integrated Studies, we had a place up on Stanyan Street and was gone for the summer. And so I stayed there for a few days. So I spent the summer up here just kind of getting to know the city. There's so much immense cultural and political stuff happening. It was just like, you could spend part of the day at a Black Panther rally, come back to San Francisco, walk through the panhandle, and Janis Joplin or Carlos Santana playing free concerts. They hadn't hit big yet, so they were just starting to emerge to a larger national audience. But it's... you know, pay more attention to what's happening in the war, what's happening to the national left. And still barely kind of... I would have to say Asian American or Japanese American consciousness was still very embryonic at that point. So everything's happening really quickly.

I sit-in, so there's a sit-in in the spring of '68 at San Francisco State with a mixture of anti-war demands and also, like, participation by the Third World Liberation Front for all the pre-strike demands that we're putting out. And so for whatever, I didn't have any clear reason why, I decided to stay in and volunteer myself for arrest. Al Wong from Chinese Student Association saw me as, kind of, this Asian kid there volunteering for arrest. And so said, "Can we help you?" And I says, "No, man," like you're just, Al was thinking, okay, there's this Asian American there, and I wasn't thinking that way. So I kind of blew him off. So by the time the strike's starting to have this chic of my identity as a radical is more well-formed than it is as a person of color. And so like in that incident with Terry that I described earlier, it happens right around that time, just kind of in the late spring of '68. And so there was... I wasn't participating in this stuff, but like Penny and a lot of people in the Third World Liberation Front spent a lot of their summer getting ready for what would happen in the fall of 1968. They were planning for the strike and also at the same time bringing in the first group of EOP students from various high schools in San Francisco. So there was a lot of work going on which I was not aware of.

So I come back after having, spending a little time in jail, which I guess was developing a list of credentials in my mind at any rate, and knew that I was going to participate but then had very little idea of what that meant. Penny will give you a much better sense of what the serious work was being done at that time. So most of my thing was, like, doing what the group of younger people, mostly guys, like if leadership asked something to be done, you did it, and just feel that you're participating or contributing in some way. The jail stuff, helping getting people, was necessary work, but also the self-interested part was that it kept me out of meetings. To this day I still don't like going to meetings, but that was a legitimate activity that I could say, "I have to get down there." Got all these people busted today, and sorry, I can't go to that meeting.

PW: But the strike itself was a success in the sense that some demands were met?

PY: I think we'd have to call it a tremendous success. We didn't get the college at that point, but it became the formation of what became the first College of Ethnic Studies in the United States, which continues to this day, the scholarship that's coming out of that school, and the influences of that particular college is, I think has influenced Third World studies in College of Ethnic Studies throughout the United States. And the generations of scholarship that we're seeing from young scholars of color throughout the United States, I think a large part of that resides, that was the seed that helped get a lot of those things started.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

PW: So one of the more ironic parts of that whole history, though, too, was that the head of the college was a Japanese Canadian named Hayakawa. Do you have much to share about your memories of him and what that was like, having him at the top?

PY: I mean, Hayakawa was such a contradiction. He definitely had this kind of Bohemian cultural kind of thinking, he was a great appreciator of African American music. One of the hardest things for me during that whole period was that he brought Duke Ellington to perform at San Francisco State, kind of as a counter to what we were doing. I couldn't attend, would not attend.

PW: And what was his stance for people, again, who don't know about the history of this? What was his leadership like?

PY: Well, he was adamantly against any form of what we were doing. I guess you'd say his stance would be totally assimilationist, that there was no thing as, or should be a thing as Third World Studies or a College of Ethnic Studies. That if he took this very individualist approach, "If I can do it, why can't you do it?" kind of thing. And also kind of like, took the total binary approach that if he saw that we were trying to do is to be isolating when actually we thought of it as being very internationalist. So he tried to kind of have this authoritarian, no-negotiation stance. But success in the strike was forcing them to the table in part. And then the fact that we didn't get everything we asked for, but we got the foundation of what became. I was never academically inclined, but I know that a lot of people that I'm acquainted with were able to do the dual thing and make this immense contribution as well as develop a great substantial career based off of what they started. So I was kicked out of school because of my political activities, and I could have... those of us who were kicked out where reinstated about a year and a half later. But getting kicked out was kind of... I would have flunked out anyhow.

PW: Did you ever actually meet Hayakawa?

PY: I did.

PW: Can you tell that story?

PY: Yeah. Just, so this is... I'd spent somewhere between ninety and a hundred days in San Francisco County Jail. So I'd flown down to Los Angeles to see my parents. And on the flight back, Hayakawa and I were not just on the same flight, but we were in the same aisle. And he was in the window seat, I was on the aisle seat, and this poor young Filipino woman was between us. So we had actually a relatively polite conversation on the airplane, and he offered to give us a ride back into San Francisco, which we accepted, all three strangers to each other. And so on the drive back, our conversation got more animated, and his driving became more erratic. This poor woman must have thought, "Who are these two crazy motherfuckers?" [Laughs] Because he's driving, and he's yelling at me and I'm yelling at him. He dropped me off at Fourth and California where I was going to live for a while. That was kind of like the AAPA House.

PW: Was it revealed that you were a student at State?

PY: Yeah, we were talking about that on the airplane and we were talking about your differences. Like on the airplane, it was a relatively polite conversation.

PW: So what do you think turned the conversation to a point where he started getting agitated?

PY: I think given both of our personalities, it's just kind of like, it was inevitable that once the conversation became more substantial, that we're going to have a more heated conversation. Hayakawa was a flamboyant personality, he would try to actively stop the picket lines. He would jump up on sound trucks and rip out wires and all that kind of stuff. He did not behave like most university presidents would have behaved in those situations. And so he demonstrated that same sort of thing on the ride back. We both got both emotionally and personally engaged in the conversation. And it was clear that he was not a great multitasker because his driving became very erratic. That young woman must have been so happy when she finally got off the car. So I'm dropped off at, like, the AAPA House. We had two floors of this flat on Fourth and Cornwall. Cornwall's a little street just immediately south of California. It was a nice day, people were on the stoop. I told people, "Hayakawa just dropped me off." And with the exception of Francis, I haven't seen most of these people for the whole time I was incarcerated. So that was a pretty great homecoming in that sense.

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

<Begin Segment 19>

PW: Tell me about Francis Oka. Who is Francis?

PY: So Francis, I guess you would call mentor, role model in many ways. His father was a Kibei who spent the entirety of the Second World War in Japan. And if I remember correctly, was conscripted into the Japanese army and may have done time in Manchukuo, which was... his mother was a Japanese national. So Francis was born in Japan, as his brother Bruce was. Bruce suffered from cerebral palsy, they came back in '49. Mr. Oka was repatriated at that time with the whole family. But he was, had that kind of, Washington High School, Troop 12, that Japanese American thing in San Francisco at that time. How he became interested in poetry, literature, I can't recollect. But by the time I met him, he was an incredibly knowledgeable reader of a wide range of, not just Asian American, but advanced poetics and kind of a wide range of international literature as well as having this on the ground real time collection of Zap Comix. So he was knowledgeable about a huge range of things. How he came to City Lights has been lost to the mists of time. And Francis was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1971. But meeting him through AAPA and just kind of working at City Lights at that time. And so George Leong and I would come down whenever we had opportunity to hang out with Francis. We'd sit there on the stairs leading up to the mezzanine and just kind of, just hang out when Francis wasn't busy and then literally spend hours just talking with them and just kind of absorbing City Lights. This is... during the strike, he was still doing shifts here. So whenever we could get away, George and I were here frequently. But Francis and George were kind of like, also great role models because they saw their Asian American identity as part of a larger Third World identity, and they were both kind of, didn't limit their contacts and activities just within the Asian American community. So that was a really important thing that I picked up from both those people, and it's to be able to move within the communities of color, with curiosity at the very least, for me, and for them, a whole range of comfort and knowledgeability.

PW: So one of Francis's bosses here at City Lights was a Nisei?

PY: Yes. Shigeyoshi Murao.

PW: Shigeyoshi Murao.

PY: So Shig is, at least within our minds here at City Lights, kind of, as important as Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Shig, in my opinion, creates the aura of the store. If the store is well-known now, Shig is really foundational to creating that aura that kind of shines over all of us who were associated with City Lights. So second generation established family in Seattle. By family reputation because he was kind of the rebel in the family. He was certainly, not just for Niseis, but for Sanseis, kind of unique in his individuality and this kind of ability to shape and form an idea, an opinion, and that included being Asian but not limited to that. Just talking to people over the years, he was a beacon for, like, people in Chinatown, the Filipino community as well as Japanese Americans. We just kind of like, the fact of his presence there, and the fact that he was so clearly, this was his domain, he radiated that. It wasn't just his constant presence or his organization, he just radiated that sense of knowledgeability and, I wouldn't call it ownership, but stewardship of this place.

PW: So what was the connection between Francis, the strike, and City Lights? Was there a way that it created a pathway for you to come here?

PY: Yes. And so both, that's kind of like the time that George and I were spending here, but because Francis was very, his leadership was not forceful but charismatic in the sense that people were drawn to him and just, he was incredibly thoughtful and generous in his time and sharing of ideas. Didn't dominate a space in the same way I would say Shig dominated the space just in his presence and how he radiated out. Francis was charismatic but he didn't, he didn't intend to, but he was incredibly thoughtful. And so he was the person who visited me in jail, taking his own time out. So I was in the county jail south of San Francisco for, I'll call it ninety days, I'm not sure. But I was transferred to Bryant Street to participate in this work release program. So this is, through my uncle John and through the whole Nisei connection, there was a Japanese American probation officer who was acquainted with members of our family. And there was other extended members of the family owned a laundry on Ninth Street south of Market called People's Laundry. So unbeknownst to me, they engineered this thing. So I'm, all of a sudden, taken out of San Bruno, the San Francisco County Jail, where I felt I had established myself. All of a sudden I'm called out, "You're going to Bryant Street." What? And so I didn't really have time to collect any of the stuff that I'd gathered or say goodbye to acquaintances I had developed. I wasn't happy about it. I was less happy that all of a sudden... this is something that is engineered by the family, and it's a... but Francis would come and collect me from People's Laundry, even go out for a meal or smoke a couple joints before he took me back. And he was a motorcycle person and so we'd zip around San Francisco, do whatever for an hour or two before he would drop me back off, before I was due back at Bryant Street. Many times, I mean... and to get out of that situation early, I needed somebody to say they would employ me. And so Francis went to Lawrence and Shig and Bob McBride, who was the manager at that time, and explained my situation. So on the basis of Francis' recommendation, they hired me sight unseen. Which, I'm sure, at various points, they regretted.

PW: What kind of work did they have you do?

PY: Well, Francis was, like, transitioning out of the store. So City Lights was doing its own distribution. It continues to this day, has its own publishing branch, and that's what Francis kind of was gearing himself to start doing more work with publishing. And as a transition to that, because we were doing our own distribution, we were packing up all those and sending out all those copies of Allen (Ginsberg's) books and Philip LaMantia's books and all the people who were publishing at that time. So Francis gave up his hours at the publishing thing even though that was his goal. I could take those hours, he went back full-time in the store. So he with Janice Mirikitani published and kind of edited the first Asian American literary journal of that period, Aion. There again, this is all stuff that comes out of AAPA. But that's where his orientation was. He really was not thinking of continuing in the store, but he wanted to stay literary and he thought, and he was gearing himself towards maybe getting a position with publishing. But he short-circuited that for himself to give me this opportunity.

PW: And I should ask, too, at that time, Shig Murao's, one of his main duties was as the book buyer?

PY: Yes.

PW: Correct.

PY: So he was everything in the store. He determined who was going to work here, when it was going to be open, when it was going to be closed. We had announced hours, but that was, Shig thought it was going to stay open later, it would stay open later. He was, really respected Francis a lot. I think he approved of me only to the extent that Francis approved of me. I think Shig and I were more similar then, so we didn't actually get to know each other better until after Shig left City Lights, which is the really only unfortunate part of our history here. To me, there's not a real... outside of the fact that it is empirically, like there's this Japanese American thread that's incredibly important to City Lights, starting with Shig and Francis and then myself, and also Andy who's just the general manager here. Why that's so... it's not really clearly apparent. The apparent part is that Shig was such a clear role model and kind of icon for all of us, that Asian Americans... for everyone Asian American that I've talked to from that period, the fact of his presence there kind of gave, it was an entranceway. Yeah, we can hang here, Shig is here. Even though he wouldn't acknowledge us.

PW: And how did the job itself just evolve over the years you were there? Because you celebrated, what, fifty...

PY: My guess is fifty-two years.

PW: Fifty-two years at City Lights.

PY: So I worked up at 1562 Grant for a couple years. Francis and I kind of rented a houseboat up at Gate 6 in Sausalito for the duration of his life. Then I left publishing for a while and just kind of bounced around the city, would pick up shifts at the bookstore, but I wasn't really officially on staff. I was somebody that they would bring in if somebody was sick or something or they needed an extra hand. So I did that, bounced around for a year and half, it was just kind of house the city has changed. Cities always change. But what's different now for younger people is that the economics make it impossible to live the way that I lived, to bounce around between part-time jobs, to live on Russian Hill. Younger people think it's science fiction that I could live up on Jones and Broadway for ninety dollars a month. And that same building now, I think, goes, or that same apartment, it was a studio, well over two thousand dollars. But I could walk down Pacific, there was a bean sprout factory, there was a tofu factory. You could pick up bean sprouts for fifty cents or less a pound, tofu for, a pound of tofu for less than a dollar a pound. Because you had your five-pound sack of rice at the house for... then you pick up some char siu in Chinatown, and you could put together a week's worth of meals for well under ten dollars. That's simply not possible anymore.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

PW: I feel like I need to shift over to your partner. Where and when did you meet your future partner?

PY: Sara Chin. So that's, in the early '80s, I'm involved by that time with a lot of Asian American musicians, most notably Russel Baba and Jeanne Aiko Mercer who was their roommate. But there was a whole extensive group of, like, musicians, Anthony Brown, Japanese mother, African American father, Mark Izu, just a whole range of musicians. And forming around jazz, but we're also studying traditional Japanese music, like Jeanne and Russel were kind of foundational people at the San Francisco Taiko. Many of us also studied gagaku. It had been programmed for Buddhist seminarians preparing to go to Japan. Most of those seminarians dropped out and they ended up stuck with all these kind of Asian American musicians and we'd show up at various Buddhist temples, and forms in disarray, and this is not what they were expecting. And Togi-sensei was, we had some really good musicians, so I think particularly Russel and Mark became pretty proficient in their instruments, and Kenny Endo. So formed a really strong musical nucleus for this group of Asian Americans that was attempting to play gagaku. Poor Togi-sensei, just kind of...

PW: But this also led to the formation of an actual Asian American music festival.

PY: Well this is parallel to that. So Russel and Gerald Oshita, like all the people down in Southern California, they're doing all these things parallel to this to kind of like what Togi-sensei is doing and what Mas Kodani is doing. And then they become intertwined. And then people like Mark and Russel and Jeanne and Anthony start using all their combinations of musical experience to kind of like form something that's pretty unique just in terms of their sensibilities and the musical resources that they're drawing upon. Jazz is the foundation, but they're drawing from all these other places. I think what Russel has been doing kind of in isolation up in Mt. Shasta, but what Mark Izu and Brenda Oka continue to do, what Anthony Brown continues to do, became major influences on people like Fred Ho and John Jang. And the kind of person in all that is Gerald Oshita. He was kind of the major influence for everybody, both in Southern California and up here. His wealth of experience and his, kind of, amazing creative abilities as a musician. I don't know if we have any time to get into Gee right now, but it's...

PW: Please, we should.

PY: So Gerald Oshita was, grew up in San Francisco, J-Town, his good friend had a market that was under, the basement of that market was under Bop City. So they could sit in the basement and hear all that music. And they did sit in the basement and hear all that music that's coming there. So Gee as a young person, postwar America, is being absorbed by all this stuff. I think Diane Fujino's done some research on this, on the early days of Asian American music. But Gee always saw his interest in African American improvisational music and his interest in traditional Japanese music and these combinations therefore were just, for him, a no-brainer, yes, I do these things. He acknowledges the foundational aspects of African American music, but he also goes to Japan for several years in the early '60s, and works with, kind of, Japanese avant-garde there, kind of the emergence of Eiko & Koma, comes out of some of, like, what Gee's doing musically back there, I think to provide some of their early music for them. It was the same time, he's kind of fully active, the most advanced improvisational music happening here in the Bay Area and the States. And also he's performing at the Fillmore, and the horn section's for, like, Al Cooper and Michael Bloomfield. So he's got this whole wealth of experience, all the things that he absorbed in that intersection between J-Town and the Fillmore.

PW: And was he central to the Asian American Jazz Festival?

PY: As an influence? Absolutely. Any Asian American jazz musician that came up at that time was, knew of or directly influenced by Gee. And as his way of kind of earning a living, he became a master of repairing woodwind instruments, and he became a specialist in contrabass woodwinds. And so whether you're Rahsaan Roland Kirk, or any kind of musicians for several generations that had anything other than a standard tenor, alto, soprano saxophone, you came to Gee. When you went to his apartment, oh, it was on Laguna, it was filled with instruments, and then it was also, people gave him instruments. So contrabass sarrusophones, there was this whole series of band instruments that have become obsolete that Gee became a master of. So he unfortunately died prematurely but his celebratory concert at the time of his death was kind of like, musicians came from all over the world for that. Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Oliver Johnson, it was just kind of like, flew in from Paris, from Chicago, from New York.

PW: And Sara was part of this scene, then, too, yes?

PY: Well, she was working, came in out of this... she was working on this program called Bean Sprouts, which was one of those early PBS programs that was geared for specifically young Asian American kids. Loni Ding was the producer and kind of fountainhead of that. And through all this cultural activity, there would be occasional rent parties. And so there was a group of Kenny Endo and Gordy Watanabe had a house around, over on, I think, Fourth Avenue. There was a rent party. And so usually a rent party is you know everybody. Sara walks into this party. I was playing, but I noticed her immediately, and she left before I had a chance to talk to her. And I didn't sweat it too much because I knew everybody there. And I thought, "Oh, sure, I'll just eventually be able..." So I went through kind of an extended period of time of asking, because I didn't know her name, I gave a description, they had no idea. And so that actually turned out to be a dead end and then several months later, she walks into City Lights. The first book she bought from me, which is still just, it's another one of those seminal moments. She bought Gabriel Infante, the Cuban writer's Three Trapped Tigers, the Harper edition. It still sits on my shelves. And I said, "Oh, her." And the bought this amazing book. And so I'm trying to talk her up and she's having nothing to do with it. She comes in, buys her books, pays with cash. I kind of surmised in the neighborhood, because I'd seen her on a fairly... and so I'm kind of trying to talk to her. I'm still doing occasional music gigs, I give her, "If you give me your name, I can put your name on the door and you won't have to pay that dollar." Ixnay. Then she made her mistake and she paid with a check. Completely unethical to take a name off a check, and in those days you could backtrack it through the Yellow Pages. So have an address, da-da-da, and you can find a phone number.

So I called her up. Asian American cultural community was relatively small in those days. And so Curtis Choi was just finishing his final cut of his film on the International Hotel that he was doing, and then that was one of the first public screenings was going to be that week. And so I called her up and says, "Curtis's film is screening tomorrow. Would you like to go there with me?" And she said no. [Laughs] But she was going, so I saw her there. I guess we went out for coffee, and she says... I can't actually recall where that screening was, but anyhow, she couldn't shake me loose for the day. I need to go shopping in Chinatown, so I can carry your bags. Roommates are wondering, "What the fuck is this?" And so anyhow, I finally had to leave and I said, well, "Would you like to have dinner?" and she said yes. And she had a car and I didn't, so she was going to pick me up. I was living out on Balboa Street with Russel, Bob and Jeanne Aiko Mercer at that time. And I didn't know at the time, but Sara, she's better now, but she doesn't think about getting someplace until, the meeting's going to start at two, she starts thinking about getting there at two. So she's at least forty minutes late. I was literally walking down the stairs. I told Russel that if this person shows up, tell her I dusted. So she knocks on the door as I'm walking down the steps, so Sara thinks, god, if I'd only been five minutes later. [Laughs] And so she's developing a career as a sound recordist for documentary films, which she did very successfully for many decades.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 21>

PW: What's her family background?

PY: She's a war refugee from... her family, she was literally, as an infant, carried out of Shanghai in 1949. Her family was split politically. Some of her uncles were in the party, and her parents were not. But one of her uncles was in the party, and some of the uncles were very early in the party. They weren't on the long march, but they were up in, god, where was that? City up in northwest China where it was the Communist center point. So they go to Malaysia where Sara's mother's family is kind of a Shanghai-Beijing family, her father is Fukien. Her father's older brother had a school in Malaysia. And so they go to Malaysia, and that's where Sara spends her young childhood. But at the same time, there was a growing anti-colonial movement in Malaysia against the British. And so she leaves China as the Communists were taking over, and she leaves Malaysia as the British are establishing concentration camps for anti-colonial liberation fighters, and they come to the United States. And that's another long story. Her mother was, as a young child, adopted by an American missionary doctor, Ruth Hemengway, who was one of the first women graduates from Tufts medical school. And how she ends up in China is because one of her classmates, one of her only women classmates was Sara's grand-aunt, who was, had a smart person in the family, saw the family decline, change in China, and used a lot of the last of the remaining family wealth to educate all the kids. Sent them off to London, to America, boys and girls.

PW: And when her parents came to the United States, did they land in San Francisco?

PY: They went from Malaysia, landed on Thanksgiving Day in Boston. So she grew up in Western Mass outside of any Asian American thing. And just another one of the coincidences. Our community just, her mother was a trained nurse in China and became a, wasn't an RN but worked as a, in natal units in hospitals in Western Massachusetts, became acquainted with Philip's host mother. Anyhow, they grew up outside of that and just kind of... I would call them double refugees. And so they came slightly before Ruth Hemengway was active in Western Massachusetts Republican politics, and she was able to get them on a rider in a bill, so they came in kind of on their own thing. I guess around '59... so she comes to graduate school out here, to go to Berkeley, drives across the United States by herself, doesn't know anybody here. Apparently did very well, she got accepted into the State Department, but the war's in the midst of the early '70s, and she turned that down and went on the road for three years. Spent a year in Australia teaching with her boyfriend at that time and then they spent the next year slow boating through the Malaysian archipelago, Indonesian archipelago. They were actually in Laos in '72 or something like that and just kind of, southern Laos, and just like holy shit. And then Chris comes back to the United States and Sara goes to Taiwan to do Mandarin language studies for another year to eighteen months. And so was absent, literally on the road for three years, and then comes back here and then starts this world and kind of Asian American film movement, and then becomes an independent sound recordist for documentary films. A lot of PBS stuff, documentary stuff from the '90s into the 2000s, you'll see her, if not the sound recordist, one of the principal sound recordists.

PW: Did you guys actually get married?

PY: We did, yeah.

PW: Where did you get married and when?

PY: We got married in 1984. I forget the name of the church but it's that Stickley designed...

PW: Swedenborgian one?

PY: Yes, yes.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 22>

PW: All right. I think I'm going to have to choose one last question, because this has gone so long and there are so many great stories to pull out of you. How do you think the Sansei generation will be remembered? With the kind of experiences you have being Japanese American, the scene that you found yourself in?

PY: Well, I think our leading... and it's people like Penny and Neil, despite the great work they've done, just kind of have always been so self-effacing. And I think that's probably, the Sansei generation is not going to get the credit that it deserves. I clearly am not self-effacing. But I've devoted probably the last twenty-four years to kind of, one, making sure that City Lights is sustained, and then two, it's very slow progress that we've made about race and class in the book business. So just the last five years has been dramatically shifted because of younger activists, but I think I can take some measure of comfort that they think of me as this kind of, helping create a pathway for them. But it's their work that is really kind of pushed things forward much more rapidly. We're not anywhere close to where we want to be, but it's much better than it was before we started, and they've been very thoughtful, hardworking, and clear. And I think a really clear demonstration that if progressives worked with both hands instead of, like, one hand tied behind her back, where we don't speak to each other, or just kind of let our differences dominate what our mutual goals are. So I am very proud of the fact that, particularly out of the bookselling community, we're making progress and that thing. And we're nowhere close to where we want to be, but the level of ownership by people of color, coming from mixed economic backgrounds in communities that we haven't previously seen in bookstores, is something that we're seeing grow. And even during this incredible period that we've been living through, with Covid, that the level of advocacy and also the fact that the mainstream bookselling community is, has been responsive in a constructive way. They haven't fought this in the way that sometimes entrenched interests can do.

PW: Is there anything else that you wanted to share when you think about this interview in particular, the theme --

PY: Oh, as you can probably tell, I can go on for a long time.

PW: I could do a separate interview with you just about books.

PY: Well maybe we'll pick that up over a glass of wine at a lunch in the near future.

PW: This has been great, thank you so much.

PY: Well, thank you. It was really a pleasure to do this. I think Densho deserves a lot of credit. This is the foundations of what future historians will be able to use as a resource.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.