<Begin Segment 20>

AL: So just to catch up, when did you marry?

GY: I've been married now fifty four years.

AL: Congratulations. Same woman?

GY: Yeah.

AL: That's a good... since you come to Vegas so often I didn't know.

GY: What two women would want to be interested in me? [Laughs]

AL: So you married in 1956?

GY: '56, yeah.

AL: Thereabouts. How did you meet your wife?

GY: She was working for civil service in Japan.

AL: Oh, so you met her in Japan?

GY: No, no, then she came back and instead of going back to Hawaii she came to San Francisco and I don't know how I met her but then we started dating.

AL: And what is her name?

GY: What?

AL: What is your wife's name?

GY: Susie.

AL: Susie and her maiden name?

GY: Sato.

AL: Do you have children?

GY: Four. I have my oldest son is the chief legal advisor for Sheriff Baca, and my youngest son is a Air Force Academy graduate. He's a major, he'd go for a promotion but he's on active reserve. He left the Air Force two years early so he had to stay in the reserves.

AL: How are you different as a father than your own father?

GY: I think I'm more involved in what they do, because from my own experience with my father I didn't want that kind of relationship with my kids.

AL: Did you remain close to your siblings? I guess you said you weren't really close but throughout the rest of their lives did you stay intact as a family?

GY: Well, my sister above me, because we were pretty close in school so we kind of associated with each other's friends.

AL: And so when you moved to Japan in the 1960s, did you take your whole family with you?

GY: Yeah, I had two kids then. And then my third son was born in Japan and that was an experience because I never realized that at time in life that I was, the fact that I was Japanese would be thrown in my face again. But when I went to the American Embassy to get a passport for my son they said, "If you're son, because you are Japanese ancestry, if your son doesn't leave the country in six years, we're going to rescind his U.S. citizenship." I never heard of such a thing you know.

AL: I never heard that.

GY: Yeah and I talk to people and they never because I guess not many people go there and have kids in Japan, but so I figured six years, at least I'll send him back to America once. Once you go back and then you go back you could live all your life there and still be an American citizen.

AL: I never heard that.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.