Densho Digital Archive - Hanako Hoshiyama Fukumoto Interview (denshovh-fhanako-01-0028)

<Begin Segment 28>

KL: You mentioned Barbara. You have other children that you had in Chicago. Would you tell us who your other children are?

HF: Barbara was born in 1948 in Chicago, at the Women and Children's Hospital. She's my second one. She lives in Houston now. Her husband passed away about six year ago.

KL: What was she like when she was a little girl?

HF: But Father wanted her to learn ballet dancing. Well, anyway, he took her to this dance studio, she was so stubborn she wouldn't do it. And then she cried all the time. But then, later on, she did learn a little bit. My older son, he wanted him to learn to play the sax, so he went to saxophone class. Well, he doesn't play the sax anymore. [Laughs] You can't force the kids, they're not gonna do it.

KL: No. You can try, and they'll cry and it'll be ugly, yeah. What is your youngest son's name?

HF: He was sick when he was young, so we spent more money and a doctor on him, so he didn't learn anything.

KL: What is his name?

HF: Bob, Robert.

KL: And what were their interests? Who did they become as people?

HF: So then he's the one that lives in Colorado. He became a CPA... he wasn't a CPA, he was a CEO of small cable company, and he retired about... well, he retired when he was, I don't know, fifty, forty-eight. So he's sixty-two now. And then my oldest son had his own business, so he retired at forty-six or something like that. My husband kept telling them, "Don't work all your life, because your stress is going to kill you," so they all retired. So they're doing okay.

KL: What do they... what do they know about your experience in Manzanar? Are they, have you had conversations with them ever?

HF: Well, they know a little bit now that we're talking more about it. But they want a copy of the conversation today.

KL: Do you remember them learning ever about the camps or the Japanese American removal happened? Did they ever ask you about...

HF: No, they didn't ask me, but my son, the oldest one went to stop at Manzanar, so he's learning more about it, what went on. But we never discussed it at home.

KL: They never had a school project or anything that prompted them to ask you?

HF: No. I think now they do, but at that age, they didn't have it in the textbooks or anything.

KL: I was curious about... you've lived in several different places, and so you are kind of a good opportunity to see how those places compare. I mean, you were in California in the 1920s and '30s, and then Manzanar, Chicago from the 1940s until the '80s, right?

HF: Right.

KL: And now Las Vegas as an older adult. When you think back on all those places, how do they compare to each other, or what do you remember strongly about them?

HF: The weather's so different. I like it here because the weather's... but I think it'd be different if I had to live in a different house in a different area. We bought a house near Rainbow and Sahara when we first came, that was the end of town. Then my son bought a house at the Lakes, and he still lives in that house, and he moved here in '86. So he's still there. And my daughter, when she lived here for a while, she had a house on that expressway right there, in Far Hills, so that's not too far from here.

KL: What about what the places are like culturally, or how people deal with diversity?

HF: Well, when we first moved here, we were very active in the Japanese American club. And they did so much, George Goto, he was the president, he had founded that Japanese American club, he got us involved in a lot of things, and that was fun. So I did Japanese dancing, and it was a lot of fun. We volunteered to Channel 10, when they had the fundraisers.

KL: What is Channel 10?

HF: It's a PBS station. And they had fundraisers and we would go help them man the telephones. It was a lot of fun those days. Of course, now I'm older, I don't do all those things anymore.

KL: You said it was George Gota?

HF: Goto, G-O-T-O. And he used to go fishing to San Diego, and he would come back with a tuna, and then he would distribute the tuna, and we really enjoyed that.

KL: And you said the group was the Japanese American club?

HF: Uh-huh. We still have that, but they don't do those things anymore. It's a different generation.

KL: So you used to do dancing, and what else did that group do?

HF: Volunteering different things, when they needed us anywhere, he would volunteer us. And then he would have parties in his backyard. It was fun those days.