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MR: Growing up in Hood River, obviously, your father was very prominent and helpful in the community.

HY: Yeah.

MR: And how did it feel to be a child of someone so influential?

HY: Well, ambivalent for me. Speaking personally for myself, I knew that my father was influential, you know. For example, I knew that he was the only Japanese member of the Rotary Club. I knew that he was the only Japanese who was on the board of directors of the Apple Growers Association. I knew that he was a leader of the Japanese community and the spokesperson, and so, in that sense, I was proud. But at the same time, when I'd hear him get up to make a speech or something, I'd detect these little nuances, and just being a hypercritical kid, "Hey, that's wrong," just very little minor things. It didn't... the substance of the speech was fine. It's just that the little inflections and the nuances, and I'd be kind of embarrassed for him and embarrassed for myself because my father was like that. He didn't know English that well, and he was a slight man too, and sometimes he'd act bigger than he was. [Laughs] So it was ambivalent for me. Now, that's not true of all my siblings because I speak only for myself on that one.

MR: You used the term "spacious dreams" when you described your father, and he was a forward thinking person.

HY: Oh, very much so.

MR: Do you know why or how he was so convinced that the American dream was for him?

HY: Well, I don't know why he thought that. I know that he came over with the idea. I can document this because we have some of his old letters that goes all the way back to 1903, and in it, he's written that this is a great land. You know, he's the one that wrote to my uncle and said, "You should plan to stay in this great land of freedom." My uncles were working on the railroad in Divide, Montana. He's eighteen years old, and he's writing on this, planned to stay in this country, planned to learn the language, planned to stay here. But I don't know why he was so motivated to do that. I guess he probably felt that his opportunities were better. And as it turned out, it was, because at home in Nanukaichi, his father was a small landowner, not a businessman, nothing like that. His brother did turn out to be a very successful businessman, so I assume, I don't know. I assume that my father figured well, he's going to be a small landowner just like his father; in other words, a farmer. He didn't want to be just a farmer. He wanted to own farm and not just run 'em.

MR: Hood River seem to attract a good number of Japanese people. What was it about Hood River?

HY: Well, I think probably one of the major factors is it's a beautiful place, and it's kind of reminiscence of some places and lots of places in Japan. It's mountainous, it's got green trees, it's got water, it's got rivers, it's got lakes, it's got Mount Hood, you know. And some of the Japanese would be very fanciful and say, oh, Mount Hood, niniteru, looks like Mount Hood. Well, it doesn't, I mean not Mount Hood, Mount Fuji. It doesn't really look like Mount Fuji, but I mean, it's a snow-capped mountain. So they would make these allusions, and so that appealed to them. The other thing that appealed to them I think is because there was work to be done there, lots of work. And in those days, it was clearing, this was for men, clearing the land of stump from sawed off logs, land from the Oregon Lumber Company. So at one time, there was about six hundred Japanese in that valley clearing out stumps, so they got jobs doing that. And a lot of them, not a lot of them, a few of them, instead of getting paid money, they were paid in land. They got a small portion of land they cleared. So here was a chance for them to become landowners and relatively easily. It was hard work, but, in those days, the alien land law was still not enforced, so they could own land in their own name, so they did. And I think that was another reason why because they had an opportunity to become independent landowners. Hard work, yes, but they can own something of their own.

MR: Hood River had a notorious reputation early on for conflict or tension between the communities. Were you aware of that as a child?

HY: No. I wasn't aware of it as a child. You know where I mostly found out about that was during the war. As a child, no, I didn't know that there was such thing as the Anti-Asiatic League. I knew there was an American Legion. I had kind of funny feelings about the American Legion, but I didn't really think or know at that time that there was so many rabble, diehard, "two hundred percent Americans" in that outfit. I didn't know that. It was during the war that all this came. And subsequently, too, since the war, I've read, my god, I knew a lot of these people. I never knew they felt that way. One of the most hurtful things to me is one of my schoolteachers, a shop teacher, was one of these real rabble guys that wanted to keep us out of the valley. He went to extreme measures to do that, and it's my teacher. Holy cow, I never knew that. But at the time, I didn't know it. It was something I found out later. That was a bitter blow.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.