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MR: This is an interview with Homer Yasui, a Nisei man, seventy-eight years old, at his home in Portland, Oregon, on October 10, 2003. The interviewer is Margaret Barton Ross of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center's Oral History Project 2003. Good morning, Homer, and thank you for having us in your home. Can we start out just talking about where you were born and when and your birth order in the family?

HY: Okay. I was born in Hood River, Oregon, on December 28, 1924.

MR: And how many children were there in your family, and where did you land?

HY: Well, in the very beginning, there were nine children, but two of them died in the early age. My oldest brother is eleven years, between eleven and twelve years older than me, and I was the eighth child, so next to the last, and my younger sister is two years younger than me. So there was a widespread between the oldest and the youngest.

MR: And how many boys and how many girls?

HY: Five boys and three girls.

MR: Okay. Can you describe your father and his life and work?

HY: [Laughs] That could be the subject of a whole book by itself. But yes, briefly, my father was a very intense individual. Physically, he was quite small, but he was, I wouldn't say brainy, but he was quite intelligent, and he had great ambition. He had spacious dreams. He wanted to accomplish things in this world. But one of the things that he realized very early is that there was such a thing as prejudice and discrimination. It was not easy in those days when he arrived in the United States --which was 1903 -- to do other than physical work, and he came over with the idea of actually working on the railroad. But he was small, and he couldn't really keep up with the railroad work because that was very physically demanding. So eventually, he decided, well, he came to the United States to get an education specifically to learn English and also to get an American education. And moreover, by the time he was eighteen -- this is two years after he got here -- he decided he was going to stay permanently in the United States, and this is what he did. But it's most unusual for someone at that age, eighteen, deciding he's going to stay forever in the United States, and he even tried to prevail upon his two older brothers to do that. But as I say, my father was quite ambitious, so he realized that, hey, if he's going to stay in this country forever, he's not going to spend time carrying railroad ties and replacing railroads and things like that. So he went to school in Portland at the Couch Street School, the old one, and eventually got an education. He became, because of his great determination, he learned English quite well. He wasn't perfect. He wasn't letter perfect because Japanese is always his first language, but he was very, very good. He could type -- not real well -- but he could type, and his grammar was quite good. His accent was pretty good, so I would say that his conversational ability in English was far superior to most comparable Issei of his age. There were others that were good too, but he was one of the better ones. And because of his ambition, he wanted to get ahead in the world. And I don't know if he wanted to make a mark in the world, but he wanted to make, secure enough money so he didn't have to worry about finances and so on. So to that end, he was a pretty astute business entrepreneur too. So he got into real estate in Hood River, and eventually he wound up in the, together with my brother, my uncle rather, not my brother, my uncle, ended up owning about 1000 acres roughly, 800 to 1000 acres of farm property, and this is all producing land. So he became in those days probably a wealthy man. And at the same time, the Yasui brothers were running a general mercantile store in Hood River which also handled Japanese goods and things like that, so they were doing quite well getting, they had recovered pretty well from the Depression in 1929, and things were really looking up when boom, Pearl Harbor came and that shattered his world.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.