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BN: Before we go there, yeah, I want to back up a little bit. And -- What were your parents' names and approximate dates of birth?

SH: Yes, okay. My mother's name was Satsuko Kodama; she became Higashi. And my father was Setsuo Higashi, and they were both born in 1917.

BN: Okay. And then you said they were kibei, so they were born in the U.S. But it sounds like, as you're describing it, did they go back to Japan with their parents, with their families?

SH: Yes, and very young. So they hardly spent any time in this country at all.

BN: So culturally they were almost more Issei.

SH: Exactly.

BN: And then how? Were they already married when they came back to the U.S., or how did they meet?

SH: No. Well my father came courting because he was going to come to inherit that market in Long Beach, and he needed a wife. And he needed someone who could immigrate with him so he was courting my mother. And my mother said that he took her to what was then called katsudo shashin, but is now eiga. And they went to coffee shops and she agreed to marry him. I don't know if she was fully cognizant of what she was getting into.

BN: So it was sort of -- it was not an arranged marriage then.

SH: No. It was a marriage of convenience in the sense that he needed someone who could immigrate with him, someone his age.

BN: And then when they came back; this was pretty close to the beginning of the war, right?

SH: Exactly.

BN: When they returned?

SH: A couple of years or so, right.

BN: And then you mentioned -- this was his brother that had the store in Long Beach?

SH: Yes, yes.

BN: And you said he was later picked up by the FBI.

SH: My mother said that after Pearl Harbor, the FBI came and arrested him, and she remembers everybody gathering in the living room and saying goodbye to him. They wound up in Arkansas and later in Chicago.

BN: But were they running the store together, or did the uncle go somewhere else?

SH: Oh, no. At the time that he owned the store? My mother said he owned the store; his wife helped him; he hired another guy as an employee. My father came and he was employed when he wasn't going to the local high school, and my mother said she remembers getting up very early in the morning, washing the vegetables, polishing the fruit, you know, arranging them on the stands, etc. So the five of them worked together. However, my mother's recollection of her sister-in-law was entirely negative. She was not a woman who was at all welcoming or made my mother feel at home. And I think a certain amount of friction resulted -- at which (time) my mother knew some people, had gotten to know some people who offered my father some employment in L.A. And so they moved there. So I was born in L.A. But after the war broke out he had to go back to run that market because my father, I mean, my uncle had been dragged off by the FBI.

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