<Begin Segment 9>

MR: How did the Nisei maneuver themselves through the various systems; taxes, banking? If they couldn't speak the language so well, how did they manage to get these things taken care of?

HY: Oh, with great, great difficulty. First of all, almost all communities, this is a big community or a small community like Hood River or even the Dalles, they usually had one elder. When I say elder, somebody who's more educated or who is more adaptable, who voluntarily or otherwise took on the role. The other thing that the Japanese did, they are great organizers, and they invariably form what they call a Japanese Association. It's called, in those day it was called a Nikkeijinkai. And a Nikkeijinkai, the ancestral society now, what we call the Portland Ancestral Society, their precursor was the Japanese Association. They were the people who would do the interpretation, the translation, legal thing, and do the work. If they didn't have an organization, like in Hood River, we did have an organization, but my father because of his, by virtue of his English capabilities, became the de facto leader of the community because he could translate. He could read and write English and he can, do all these sort of things, where there were other Issei men that could do it, but probably not as well as my father. In Portland here, they had educated men who, they had several medical doctors who graduated from medical school. You have to know English for that, but they were busy in their profession. But they had at least one, maybe two other men who had gone to law school. Now being Issei, you have, in order to be a licensed attorney in Oregon anyway, you have to be a citizen, U.S. citizen. Issei could not be citizens. So even though Daichi Takeoka graduated from the University of Oregon Law School in 1912, he was not licensed. But he did graduate from law school, so he became a legal adviser. He was not an attorney. He didn't charge. He became a leader and a legal attorney for the... legal adviser for the Japanese community. That was one man. The other man was probably Senichi Tomihiro who ran the Foster Hotel. He probably also graduated from the law school too. But again, he could not be licensed, so then these men were both capable of writing and reading English. They were as good if not better than my father, both of them. They're very fluent. They did have accents because English was always their second language, but they were very good. And so that's the way the Isseis handled these things either through by virtue of a leader and every little community had one, at least one, sometimes several. But almost all communities also had a Japanese Association, so they went to that. Plus, they had other support systems, many, many support systems. Japanese are just tremendous organizers, and they'd have kind of like trade unions. They're not exactly trade unions, but well, kumiai is an example. It's a business organization like the hotel owners' association or the merchant's association or the apartment's association. Then they had the church groups. Then they had the welfare society, so they have all kinds of support groups. So one way or another, you could find your way getting an answer to, if you had to register for say alien registration, they, most of them would go to the Nikkeijinkai, the Japanese Association, to have somebody help you. Particularly because the women, most of them couldn't read or write English, so that's the way they did it. But the Japanese Associations were extremely important. The interesting thing is in Japan, they have no equivalent to Japanese Association. They don't need them in Japan. It's a unique organization in countries overseas from Japan because they have them all over, and they still have it in Japan. It's changed, the focus has changed. The primary purpose was still the same.

MR: After the Issei got here, was there much communication back to Japan?

HY: Oh, yeah. Communication, of course, it was in letter form, yeah, oh, yeah, and some telegram and so on. But physical communication in terms of going back for vacation, trips, that was pretty uncommon because that takes a lot of money. But communications, oh yeah, from letter because almost all Japanese were literate to one degree or another. If they couldn't write their kanji which is a classical Chinese, they can at least write the syllabalry which is hiragana or katakana, so they can write, read and write. But traveling back and forth was not a common thing.

MR: At one time, your family did go back?

HY: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, my family went back in 1926, in the summer of 1926. And my family took the, well, my father and mother and let's see... my sister Yuki was dead by then, so there were eight of us, no, Yuka wasn't even born, so there were seven of us, see. Yuka wasn't born until 1927, so there was seven. My mother was pregnant at that time with Yuka. So we went back to Japan to a little town on Nanokaichi. And of course, I don't remember because I wasn't quite two years old then, but we have photographs from this visit, and we, there's a nice photograph where we visited the family cemetery in Nanokaichi. In those days, a lot of families had their own kind of a private enclosure cemetery. We had one, and there's a big family photograph taken there, and we stayed there, oh, probably a couple months in Japan. That was the last time my father really went back to Japan. Well, it was the only time that my mother and father went back to Japan until after the World War II, so they hadn't seen Japan for a long time. But they were constantly exchanging letters with relatives back there.

MR: In Hood River, the Issei were able to own property which they gained you said yesterday from, in payment for clearing stumps. What happened when they could no longer own property?

HY: Well, there was never a time when they could never own property because the basic strategism for owning property was not directly in their own, and they could not own property in their own name. What they did is they owned property through their surrogates which were their children. So even minor children like my brother Chop, property was bought in his name when he was a teenager, and he couldn't legally own that. But my father was his guardian, therefore, he controlled my brother who controlled the land. So by that strategism, and that was perfectly legal. The other thing that the, some Japanese did earlier until it was declared illegal, is they formed owner corporations, and they incorporated, the corporation would buy the land. Later in California, that was declared illegal, circumventing the law, because the major stockholders of the corporation were Japanese aliens ineligible for citizenship. But the corporation could own the land, so, but that was as I say declared illegal. So the main ploy was to buy land in the name of your own children. Now, in certain families, they didn't have any children. So what they'd do is they borrowed the name of a friend's child, and they'd buy the land in his name. Now that depended a great deal on trust because if this Nisei who, maybe a teenager didn't want, when he became of age, hey, this is my land. I'm twenty-one. This says this belongs to Tim Rooney. [Laughs] So you can say this is my land; you don't have it. But that was, the social structure was so tight in the Japanese community, that was very, I've never heard of anybody doing that, but it was legally possible to do that as you can see. But I've never heard of anybody violating that trust when somebody was holding land for a non-relative. But those are the two basic ways.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.