<Begin Segment 4>

MA: So why did your grandfather move to this area that was...

BU: From Japan?

MA: Or that was, had practically no Japanese Americans living in it?

BU: Oh, I'm not sure why, how he came to buy that house in north Oakland, I don't know. I know why they came to America, the Utsumis, my grandfather was born, his name was Yoshida when he was born, and he married my grandmother who was Utsumi. And my grandmother's father was a Shinto priest. My grandfather, Yoshida's father, was a samurai. And my, in Japan, my grandfather married into the Utsumi family to become the Shinto priest to take over the temple or... what was the name? I forgot the name of the jinja, oh, my gosh. Anyway, he was supposed to become the Shinto priest. In fact, I think he studied for it. Well, somewhere along that time, my grandmother ran into a Methodist missionary, and she and my grandfather converted to Christianity, and you might say fled Japan and came to the United States. That's the reason they came, was because, you know, they couldn't live there because he didn't become the priest there.

MA: Interesting.

BU: Yeah.

MA: So then they settled in, in Oakland, in this area that happened to have very few Japanese Americans living there.

BU: Well, no. Originally they did settle in downtown Oakland, originally, and in fact, whether he owned the house or renting the house I'm not sure. But during the 1906 earthquake, they took in a lot of people from San Francisco temporarily (...) people that lost their houses in San Francisco. I don't know much more than that, I do know that my dad was saying he remembers that, and I think because it happened right before he went back to Japan to go to school.

MA: Okay.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.