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BN: So what year did you actually move?

JF: I moved here in 1990. It was a coin flip. Because at the time, I was seriously corresponding with this guy up in Astoria, I think it's along the Idaho-Oregon border. He owned a tofu factory, and along with a three-bedroom, two and a half bath house, from which his wife ran a bento, little bento pickup thing. Anyway, so he had ten thousand clients, so he said, for his tofu business, and he was looking for an apprentice to train to take over how to make tofu and continue delivering to his clients. Because he had to leave to help his father, who ran three restaurants in Portland, but needed his help. And so that kind of intrigued me, we had correspondence, he sent me photographs, he made this great offer that would include the business and the house. I was real close to pulling the trigger on that until I asked Jeri, finally, "What do you think of this?" This is the deal, this is the price, we could do it now, and it would be a way for me to escape from this, at the time, I was a software consultant, and I had to be at the airport between four and six on Sunday, and I wouldn't see the family until I came back home at ten p.m., usually after ten p.m. on Friday. So we only had Saturdays together, which Jeri, by the way, loved. Anyway, I asked her, "What do you think?" and she said, "You know, if we move there," and she showed me on the map where it is, "no one's going to visit us. We're going to lose track of everybody." So I said, "Okay, then we won't do this." And instead, we'll fall back on an original plan that had fallen through to move to Kauai where a friend and now pastor of hers was working, and I forgot the name of the church. There was a job opportunity there at the community college, but I had kind of a Calabash uncle, George Sasaki, who had Sasaki Jewelers, George Sasaki Jewelers, which is still in operation on Fort Street, downtown Honolulu, and his son, Hans, and I were the same age. So we kind of knew each other, didn't really stay in touch regularly, but kind of knew each other. Anyway, at least we knew somebody here, and so we decided we would make the move here because we felt comfortable here and we thought, yeah, for Michael growing up, it's way better than him being the only face of color in his first grade classroom picture. It's like, okay, there's Michael. [Laughs] It was easy to pick him out in that class. So, yeah, we thought it would better, and it was, and it has been. So we've never looked back, never thought about moving back.

BN: And then the Oregon story, is it Astoria or Ontario?

JF: I thought it was Astoria.

BN: Because Astoria, I think, is on the 5, isn't it? Ontario is the one on the Oregon-Idaho border.

JF: Oh, really?

BN: And it actually has a substantial Japanese community.

JF: It does?

BN: Yeah. But maybe I'm getting... I'm actually writing about it now. It was a destination for many people avoiding incarceration from the Pacific Northwest. They had a friendly mayor, so there was a substantial community there. So if there's a tofu business, it's got to be in a place where there's...

JF: Is there an Owyhee River there?

BN: There are rivers, I don't know the names of them though.

JF: Okay. I don't know why that stands out.

BN: Anyway, off topic, but I was just wondering if that was Ontario, maybe. But anyway...

JF: I've got to remember that.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.