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BY: Today is October 18, 2022, and I am here with David Yano at the Lakeshore retirement community in Seattle, Washington. My name is Barbara Yasui, I am the interviewer, and our videographer today is Dana Hoshide. So we're just going to go ahead and get started. So can you tell me what your full name is?

DY: David Arthur Yano.

BY: And when and where were you born?

DY: I was born in Washington, D.C., July 19, 1944.

BY: Okay, so right in the middle of the war.

DY: Right.

BY: Okay. And I'm going to ask you a little bit about your parents. What was your father's name?

DY: Thomas Yano.

BY: And when and where was he born?

DY: He was born in Port Blakeley, Washington, in 1912.

BY: 1912. And Port Blakeley is where?

DY: I think it's Bainbridge.

BY: On Bainbridge Island?

DY: Right.

BY: Okay, all right. And what do you know about your father's early life?

DY: Kind of weird. What happened is he was born here in Port Blakeley, and his grandfather died and the family moved back to Japan to take over the estate. And he was there probably ten, age ten, and from what I understand, he missed the deadline for matriculating into high school, and so he was destined to be a vocational student. And so he didn't like Japan and so he jumped the ship, worked as a cabin boy and back to Seattle.

BY: And do you know when that was? How old was he or what year it was?

DY: He was eleven.

BY: When he came back?

DY: Right.

BY: Wow, he was quite young then. Just all by himself?

DY: Right.

BY: So he came back to Seattle and then what did he do?

DY: He picked strawberries and went to school, and he worked on my mother's family's farm in the summertime. So that's how they met.

BY: And then so he finished school, and then what happened?

DY: He finished school, and this is kind of funny, because his math teacher, he was good in math, and she says there was a foreign student scholarship, "Why don't you sign up for it?" And he said, well, I was not a foreign student, "I was born here." She then said, "Well, you look foreign to me, sign it." So he applied, and he got a full bore scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, Ivy League school. And so he went back to Philadelphia and studied there, graduated, and moved.

BY: So after he graduated from University of Pennsylvania, where did he go? Did he go back to Seattle?

DY: Just to marry my mom, and then they went back east to Washington, D.C.

BY: And why Washington, D.C.?

DY: Probably work.

BY: So did he have a job?

DY: No.

BY: Oh, okay. And he didn't want to live on the West Coast anymore?

DY: My mother didn't want to live on the West Coast anymore.

BY: And why was that?

DY: She didn't get along with her mother.

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