<Begin Segment 17>

MA: How did you meet your wife?

TN: My wife was the sister of one of the Japanese boys that we played around with in basketball. I always noticed her, but I never thought we would get together. But we finally did, and that was in 1958, so it's been fifty years.

MA: And you mentioned that you got married in the Buddhist church.

TN: That's right. We, we actually got married in the Buddhist church, and for some reason, we gravitated towards the Christian church, and she got baptized there, all of our kids go there, although we have many friends at the Buddhist church, and we still attend a lot of their functions. In fact, the two churches work very well together, holding bazaars and things.

MA: How, about how old are both churches? When were they established?

TN: Well, our church is at least eighty years old, and it was a church that was built from scratch, and it was started by Japanese, it wasn't started by any other group. Issei pioneers, and we had all that documented, and the Buddhist church, I think, has a very similar record. In fact, they might even be older than our church. But we've always been across the street from each other, and of course, being a small community, everybody knows each other, and there's a lot of interacting between the two.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.