<Begin Segment 18>

MR: Now all the while this is all going on, you're married and having children. How many children do you have?

HY: Three.

MR: And they are?

HY: Oh, okay. The oldest one is Barbara, and she lives in Marysville, Washington. And the next one is Meredith. She lives on Vashon Island. And the youngest one -- who's forty-six by the way -- lives in Portland, and they all have kids.

MR: How many grandchildren?

HY: Seven.

MR: I won't ask you to name them.

HY: Okay.

MR: How did you find time to be involved in the JACL and keep this job being a doctor and the family, how did you balance all that?

HY: Well, I don't think I balanced it too well according to some people. [Laughs] But it did work out though because, we give and take in our family. So generally speaking, after a little bit of discussion, we tried to figure out our priorities, and both Miki and I were interested in JACL, and we're both still interested in civil rights, and we're interested in our ethnic culture, very much interested in that. We're very much interested in our history. So fortunately for us, we're not all that far apart on the most important thing. We are on things like whether fruits are good for you or vegetables are good for you or who wants to eat broccoli. We're way apart on that, but that's peanuts.

MR: And you've retired now?

HY: Oh, yeah.

MR: When did you retire?

HY: Oh, I retired in 1987, so going on seventeen years, eighteen years.

MR: So in this retirement career of yours, what are you, how are you spending your time?

HY: Well right now, we're moving, Margaret, and it's a terrible, terrible job because we still have so much junk in our house. You know, we lived there forty-seven years, and you accumulate your kid's treasures and broken bottles and even rocks and shells that we picked up on the beach forty years ago and things like that. So we don't even have our house up for sale, but we will hopefully. But what we're doing after we get settled down is Miki and I, I have plans. I'd like to do some writing about, not any big story, about my family and the Nikkei experience, not for publication but for my own children and for my own family. It's not for the greater population. And then I'd like to work on all the thousands of photographs we have because most of them aren't even captioned, so it's important to have why and where and when and who. So I want to do that, and I figured, hey, that's going to take a lot of my time. But at this place, it's, somebody said, living here is like living on a cruise ship. There's all kinds of things you can do. They have a swimming pool, health gym, ice cream parlor, gamble -- well, no gambling. But there's church and places they eat and all that sort, there are all kinds of things you can do, and they have excursions. So, hey, I think we're going to have a great time here.

MR: Looking back on all that you've experienced, what lessons have you learned about America?

HY: Well, I think the foremost lesson is don't give up. Well, when things look bad and everything turns against you, just don't give in. Hang in there, keep fighting. Japanese have a word for it, ganbatte, and I think that's a very, very good thing for almost everybody to remember, just to try to achieve. Stay in there, stay the course.

MR: I still keep thinking of your father's spacious dreams. I love that. What do you think he would think now if he saw his children?

HY: Pardon?

MR: What do you think he would think now with all of his children and what they have accomplished?

HY: What he would think and what he would say are two different things. But what I think he would think is, "By golly, I think all my lectures and all my sermons did some good because my kids turned out pretty good, you know. They got a good life, they got good family, they got good spouses, and they made a difference in the world," and that's all he wanted. He said, "Make a difference, a positive difference in the world. As long as you're here, you're here for a purpose, so your purpose is to do some good," and I think that he would have felt that. I don't think he'd have ever said it, but I'm almost positive that's what he would have thought.

MR: We're coming kind of close to the end of our interview. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to talk about?

HY: No. No, I don't think so, Margaret. I think we've covered it all. I think it's about time for lunch break.

MR: One more question. Is there anything that we did talk about that you'd like to go back and say more about?

HY: Well, eventually, I would like to talk about the discrimination and prejudice in the Hood River Valley although it's dragging up old bones and old stories and so on. But you know, that thing really irks me to this day, and I suppose people should let bygones be bygones. That bothers me still to this day, and here I'm towards the end of my life. That's a bad attitude, but maybe we can do it --

MR: In part two.

HY: Yeah, yeah. Okay, good.

MR: Well, thank you very much for your time and your patience.

HY: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed that.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.