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MA: So I wanted to ask you about the Japanese American community in Minneapolis. How close is it, how tight-knit, and how does it compare with, say, the communities on the West Coast?

BH: At the beginning, they were very close, the Niseis were close. But then now it's the third generation, so it's kind of spread apart, because they live in different suburbs and all that, and they have the old churches out there. But, see, it started out on Blaisdell, where Reverend Kitagawa and Father... let's see now, Reverend Kitagawa and... I can't think of his name now. Anyway, they had this community center that belonged to the diocese that Reverend Kitagawa was with. And they let them have this building so we can have a Japanese community center. So we used to go there and change storm windows, and people would volunteer to cut grass, all this kind of thing. But then it got to the point where there wasn't enough people coming to it because the Niseis were at the point where they're on their own and all that. And so their kids went to the suburbs where their friends were and where their schoolkids were and all that. So then the diocese closed, they got rid of the building.

MA: But this building, what types of activities did they have there for the Niseis?

BH: People went there to do... gee, I came at the tail end just before they sold it. I only helped to clean the, put the storm windows on and stuff like that. 'Cause it was shortly after that that they got rid of it. But they had Japanese dances that they learned in there. They had the JACL meetings there, they had all sorts of things like that. And then they had some, a group of people for the church service. I think the Buddhist group met there, too, and stuff. But it just gradually drifted apart.

MA: And Reverend Kitagawa, was he, where was he from?

BH: Originally? He was from, he was in Kent, Washington, when the war started, let me put it to you that way. And so a few years before that, we used to, our ACF used to go over to O'Brien's because they had a group there. And we used to intermingle with the two groups. We'd be guests of theirs and they'd be a guest of ours and that kind of thing at the ACF, Auburn Christian Fellowship. And then it wasn't long before that when the war started, so it didn't last very long that way.

MA: Okay, so he was from the West Coast and resettled like a lot of other people.

BH: Right, yeah.

MA: Okay.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.