<Begin Segment 22>

SG: Were your parents able to work after they returned to Portland?

GA: My mother used to work as a domestic after she came back. My father had been ill all this time, so he never did work after he came back, but my mother did work as a domestic for many years.

SG: What kind of illness did your father have?

GA: Arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, so his joints were all snarled, foot bones were snarled, toes.

SG: And so were you the main supporter of your family?

GA: Yes.

SG: You were married at this time. Did you live with your parents as well?

GA: Not after we got married. Except when we were in Utah, my mother and father came to live with my first wife and me for a couple of, two, three years in Utah, two years. That's the only time we lived together. After we returned to Portland, we lived separately. I helped them financially, but we lived separately.

SG: Where did you move, where did you live when you moved back to Portland?

GA: When we first came back, my wife and I lived with her family for just a few months until we bought our home close by, and we lived there for many years.

SG: What part of Portland was that?

GA: Southeast near Powell Boulevard.

SG: Were there other Japanese Americans that settled in that area?

GA: There were some, but it was not, they were not congregated in that area, just a few families.

SG: You said you returned to Portland and worked in insurance and did your wife work at that time?

GA: No, she did not. Raising kids.

SG: How many kids did you have at this --

GA: Well, at that time two, two at that time.

SG: So you moved to, near Powell Boulevard and worked in insurance, and what happened after that?

GA: As far as business was concerned, I was in the insurance business, first of all, I was in the life insurance business. Then I was selling life insurance, I learned that Japanese Americans were having a hard time buying fire insurance and automobile insurance because of discrimination by the insurance companies, so I contacted a general insurance company who would accept Japanese Americans in their insurance business, and that's how I got into the general insurance business, too, in addition to the life insurance. And that situation was there until 1949 when the Japanese American older people, the Isseis, would come to my insurance office and have me help them get their travel documents when the U.S. government started to release permits for them to go back to Japan to visit Japan, and that's how I got into the travel business when the Japanese, older people would come to my insurance office and speak to me in Japanese to get their travel documents.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.