<Begin Segment 22>

TI: Okay, so you spent seventeen years in Detroit and you had family there. What caused you to move from Detroit to St. Paul?

YM: Well, I got an offer to work for the 3M company here in St. Paul. I thought it was a good move to make, and as it turned out, it was a good move to move out of Detroit. [Laughs] But anyway, we moved here in 1961.

TI: And so your boys were all kind of adolescent days?

YM: Well, the eldest, Steve, was in high school. And David was in junior high school, and Joe, the youngest, was in elementary school.

TI: So it was probably a tougher transition for your older boys.

YM: It was tough for Steve.

TI: To have to leave, yeah.

YM: 'Cause it high school, it was kind of hard to make friends, you know. But Dave and Joe adapted very well.

TI: And so what kind of work did you do at 3M?

YM: Well, it was mainly the same sort of work I'd been doing in Detroit, it's building construction work. We did a lot of, instead of regular commercial buildings, we were doing factory buildings. And we, our division was called Central Engineering and we were sort of a service group for the other division engineers. There are several division engineering groups at 3M, tape division and abrasive division, they all each had their own division and their own engineering groups. But they were mainly involved in process engineering. And if they wanted to build a plant in some location in the U.S., they would call on us to find the real estate and to provide the plants for them. So we would do that. Either hire other architects or we'd do the design ourselves.

TI: Well, this must have been a busy time. Because 3M became a really huge corporation.

YM: Well, it was a small company when we went there. I think it was like a five hundred million dollar business. And by the time I retired it was up around eighteen billion dollar business. So it really grew.

TI: And with that, lots of their plants, their facilities, you probably were part of a lot of those new buildings?

YM: Yeah, I was part of some buildings in California and Oregon, places like that.

TI: Now, I'm curious, you spent time in Detroit and there was a Japanese American community there, and then you come to the Twin Cities and there was another Japanese American community. How would you compare the two? Because they're probably about the same size?

YM: I would imagine it's about the same size, yeah. Of course, we didn't know anyone here except one family. He was, they were San Diego people. And so the first thing I did when I arrived here was to look him up, and through them we met, well, there were two brothers. And through them we met other people. And so we were rather latecomers as far as the Japanese community is concerned, so I don't know a lot of the people. A lot of these people yesterday, I don't know them. Yosh Matsuura, I never knew him. Yesterday was the first time I met him. There are number of people like that.

TI: And you said that when you came to the Twin Cities, you got involved with the JACL here? So why did you get involved with the JACL in the Twin Cities?

YM: Well, not right away, but eventually you start to meet people and then you join the group. There were other groups here like Japan-America Society of Minnesota and St. Paul-Nagasaki Sister City Committee and other groups, Nikkei Project. We were kind of active in the Como Park Japanese garden and things like that.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.