<Begin Segment 22>

MA: So can you tell me a little bit about the International House and what it's...

CY: What I did there?

MA: Or just about the International House and what it is.

CY: Oh, well, International House was a housing for all, people from all over the world. And originally, when I started working there, it was just for upperclassmen. They didn't take any freshmen college students because the freshmen college students were, had a dormitory set up for them, you know, freshmen dorm. And it had, they stayed there for usually one or two years. But International House was for graduate students and upperclassmen. And so we, and if they took all the applications from Japan or Germany, it would be an unbalance of one country. So, but there were some countries that didn't have all those applicants, some of them maybe one or two like people from Java or, you know, from the South Pacific Islands. They may have only one representative. I felt sorry for them because there was no other friends there except they had to make new friends. But students from Germany, Japan, France and England, they had, Japan had about thirty students, Germany had about thirty students. We were able to house 565 students then, but then they renovated the place one time, and now they hold about 680 students from all over the country. It was a very interesting place to work. And I was the office manager there, and I was what they call the "working horse" administrative assistant. And I did, our office was in charge of everything from payroll to residents' rooms, collecting accounts receivable, accounts payable, and the telephone operator. We used to, in those days, we used to have these old-fashioned telephone where you plug into the different rooms. And so our, I was in charge of the person, the telephone operator, and things like that. And so we ran a very busy office. And then, so I worked there for eighteen years and I retired at, when I was sixty-two. I took an early retirement because my husband had retired from the University at sixty-seven, that was the mandatory age.

MA: And you developed a, some close relationships with the students, right, the Japanese students in particular?

CY: Japanese students. I used to, there was no Japanese restaurants around when I first started to work, and International House, for some reason, we didn't serve any food during the Easter vacation and Thanksgiving, the holidays, Christmas. And those short holidays, we didn't, the dining room was completely closed. Because so many of the students were invited to join American homes for Thanksgiving dinner, because they wanted them to see what the United States Thanksgiving was like and what an American family was like. And so I invited those Japanese people who didn't have Japanese food all the time unless you went to this one Japanese restaurant called Fuji in Berkeley, on the corner of Dwight Way and, Dwight Way and Telegraph, I think. But anyway, now they have a, have an abundance of Japanese restaurants and fast food places. But 1962, they just had one. So I used to invite them to my home for... in fact, I had a ten-pound rice, ten-cup rice cooker, but that wasn't enough. [Laughs] And so I had to buy a fifty-cup rice cooker, and so I used to invite them, and it was, I know, a meager dinner, but it was a Japanese dinner. We used to serve fish and otsukemono and Japanese miso soup and vegetables cooked the Japanese way like shirai and things. Because I liked to do cooking. And my husband was very supportive of all of that, and he used to welcome the students, so they enjoyed coming here. And every New Year, we would make a facsimile of a Japanese New Year, and we let them eat all they want, and they said (...) they couldn't eat for three days after they ate my New Year's. [Laughs] And then we had a Japanese professor, Dr. Tokunaga, she would tell the students, "Oh, Mrs. Yano likes her guests to eat a lot, so eat all you want." [Laughs] They said they ate so much that they couldn't eat for, they couldn't eat for several days for lunch, breakfast, lunch or dinner. And so we enjoyed them and they enjoyed us, too.

MA: So what type of work did your husband do? You said he worked in the university?

CY: He worked in the university. Well, the university, Mrs. Harmon, the employment officer, asked me what my husband did and how many children I had and things like that as an interview. And so I told her and then she said, "Oh, tell your husband to come and see me, too." So my husband went to see her and he gave, there was an opening in the graduate division, so he worked under the dean of the graduate school. Dean Elberg was his name, and he was the... what do you call, records, he kept all of the records of the graduate students. And I was working at international house, and his office was in Sproul Hall, that was, do you know the Berkeley campus? That's the administrative. And then it was changed to, and then we had a lot of FSM period, you know, that Free Speech Movement and all the hippies that came in. And he had to go home because they would throw tear gas and things. So it was always in front of Sproul Hall. So he got to go home early in the afternoon, and one time, and Lawrence and Doris were still on campus then, and so he, Lawrence saw Sproul Hall in flames, you know, all white, it was tear gas. And so he's, he was in the, near International House and he saw these flames going up, so he thought, "Oh, Dad's in that building," so he started running towards that. And the campus police thought he was one of the rioters, and they threw something at him, you know, landed on his feet. And so he stopped and told the policemen, "Well, my father works in that building. That's why I want to make sure my father is okay." And he says, "Oh, don't worry, all those, that building has been evacuated about two hours ago, so your father isn't there," and so he didn't have to go. But anyway, the policeman thought that he was going to be one of the rioters, running towards Sproul Hall.

MA: Well, you were at, and your husband, were at Berkeley during the '60s and '70s.

CY: But I was at International House, that's way at the other, you know... and Sproul Hall is right in the middle of campus, and so you have to go about two blocks up that hill, and so it didn't affect us.

MA: So you were more removed from all of that.

CY: Yeah, we were, we never had bombs, firebombs or anything like that.

MA: So you, so we've talked about Joyce and Doris, but you had two sons, as well, is that right? What are their names?

CY: Lawrence Yano and Eugene is the youngest. Then Lawrence is the schoolteacher who works for Unified, San Lorenzo Unified School District. He teaches math and science.

MA: And what year was Lawrence born?

CY: 1950, November 14, 1950.

MA: And Eugene?

CY: Eugene was born June 8, 1955.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.