Densho Digital Archive - Joseph Norio Uemura Interview (denshovh-ujoseph-01-0003)

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TI: Okay, so now he's in Salem. What happens next?

JU: Now he's in Salem, right. [Laughs] And living in the (home), doing the outside work and the housework for his room and board, and enjoying himself, really learning English. And within a short time he seemed to have done very well because, learning English, because he wound up at Willamette University, the Kimball College of Theology. And he was working in the, working in the lunchrooms and so forth near, around the campus.

TI: So where did, how did he prepare for college? I'm going back, looking at this, so he came over when he was about sixteen.

JU: Yes, that's right.

TI: And so for him to go from there to an American university is a pretty large gap.

JU: Right.

TI: So how did he educate himself?

JU: He took his time, and he graduated from the seminary in 1911. And so I know that during those, what, eleven years, he had pretty well gotten a good grip on what English was. And I have some of his books that he had read, needed for class, and his marginal notes are what I find interesting. And many of them are the Japanese characters saying what the English was. They're English books, obviously, and of course, he's writing the Japanese translations or the meanings. But very often, after a few years, I see that the books begin to be marginalized in English. In other words, he'd made a great, he'd made a great leap right about 1905, 1906. 'Cause that's when the books were published, and they're technical books like the History of Modern Philosophy, I have his book of that, and the marginal notes are amazing. And so it didn't take him long to get the grip of the English language. And so he ultimately preached in English and in Japanese. But the learning length of time is about a ten-year, ten-year period that he pretty well amazed me, getting his books, which I didn't get 'til he had gone, of course.

TI: So you have this sort of written document, or documents, in some ways, his progress with English, from Japanese to English.

JU: Yeah, in marginal notes. Of course, bookworms like me would get those things, I think. Anyway, it's very interesting to follow his procedure.

TI: So we're now 1911 Salem, then what happens? He graduates from...

JU: He graduates from Kimball College of Theology in Willamette University. And he takes a year off and somehow he is appointed to do student work at Berkeley, the University of California Berkeley. And there's a theological seminary that still exists. Actually, the Kimball College of Theology no longer exists because during the Depression, Willamette couldn't afford the staffing. And so in the next year, for he went to Pacific School of Religion for another year of graduate work.

TI: And this was at Berkeley, Cal Berkeley?

JU: That's Cal Berkeley, and it's still there. [Laughs] And they have joined a union of all theological seminaries at the Bay Area, and so it's one of the schools. It's the Methodist/Baptist school that's there.

TI: Do you have a sense when he was going through this if there were very many other Japanese taking a similar path?

JU: Oh, yes. Well, exactly what happened was that PSR as it's called, he was assigned to the student work helping them, helping Japanese students when they arrived to work at school or to study, either one. And he also was very interested in that work, student work, helping Japanese students acclimatize to the American culture. And that was a very, very nice move that he made, and he was very happy doing that.