Densho Digital Archive - Minoru Yamaguchi Interview (denshovh-yminoru

<Begin Segment 11>

KL: So you left right after graduation too. It was...

MY: Yeah, that took me about six or seven months to get the paperwork done, 'cause I had to go to the American consulate in, this time not in Yokohama. They moved a branch office to Fukuoka, near Nagasaki. So there was, there's only two hundred fifty, three hundred miles trip. A short -- well, it wasn't short, but then it was a lot closer than going to Yokohama. And I remember, through a translator, 'cause I didn't speak English at all then, and through -- of course, American consulate, it was American man, so he spoke nothing but English, which I couldn't understand, so they had the translator then. Then translator told me that, "Look, you have, you are a dual citizen. To go back to USA, you need to get rid of, do away with your Japanese citizenship. If you want to keep Japanese citizenship, you may not be able to go back." Well, my choices are clear. I mean, to go back, well, I gotta get rid of that. So I discarded that Japanese citizenship then, then I agreed to it and signed it, then they issued the passport.

KL: And then you went back to Yamaguchi.

MY: Yeah, back to Yamaguchi. But my passport, first passport was done "Minoru Yamaguchi, a.k.a Minoru Ono." But I don't know why they did that. The reason why I'm saying that caused me a lot of problems, when I got to San Pedro, immigration officer was, kept on questioning me about that. I couldn't answer the, 'cause I couldn't speak that well of English. It was just halted English and try to explain it, then they couldn't understand it. Then they kept me in a room a while, but they decided to let me go. Then my brother and his son, my nephew, he was five years old at the time, were waiting on the other side of the gate, but then those, the Immigration officer wouldn't let him come in to help me. Said, "No, you can't do that." But anyway, they decided to release me.

KL: Sounds scary, a little bit.

MY: Yeah, it was a very traumatic experience. Because I'm, I wasn't trying to come here as illegal. Legal, I had the passport. But because of the way the passport was written, I guess they had some kind of a suspicion, I guess. But anyway, I was alright. I was able to get through that. But anyway, after I got here and started to work at the nursery, and there were about seven or eight Japanese ladies who spoke nothing but Japanese working for the, at the nursery.

KL: This is your uncle's nursery?

MY: And the ladies were the transplant... so I worked around with them all the time, and I couldn't, I didn't learn any English at all because I was talking to them in Japanese every day.

KL: Were they immigrants? What was their story?

MY: Yeah, they were first generation people, immigrants, yes. And so I asked my brother, said maybe I would like to go to night school, or maybe even high school, and I contacted with Torrance High School and then they said, "No, you're too old already, so we cannot accept you as a high school student." My choice was just to start the night school. So I just start going to night school in Redondo Beach, which is the west from Torrance, about three nights a week. I did that for about three years. And then after that, my cousin Tosh in Malibu, his customer in Chicago had quite a huge greenhouse, nursery, bedding plants type, or seed business, and they said that they were setting up a vocational training school there to train young people with some horticultural training so that they become greenhouse flower growers or bedding plant growers and stuff like that. So my uncle asked me, says, "Do you want to go? We could buy you tuition." Said, well, since I wasn't learning any English, thought it might be a good idea for me to go there. And then I said to my uncle, said, "No, I think I have enough savings to, enough savings to pay for the tuition, or my brother George will probably help me," if I didn't have enough to pay for it. "So you don't have to worry about it, but I'd like to take up the chance." So I did. I went there, sure enough, there's nobody to understand my Japanese, so I didn't have no choice but to start speaking English. And about a year or so --

KL: Did you take classes or anything, English, English language classes?

MY: Over there?

KL: Uh-huh.

MY: No.

KL: You just listened and...

MY: Yeah. But to go to school, right away it's, we had to learn all the different names of the flowers and, not the regular name but the botanical name, which is very difficult, long name.

KL: The Latin names? Yeah.

MY: Yeah, I had to learn all that, I mean, most of them, all those different names.

KL: Yeah.

MY: So I was just using the dictionary. It was difficult for a while, but then somehow I was able to.