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JK: What are your memories of Japanese community events when you were growing up? You talked a little bit about the picnic, but are there other community events that your family or you participated in?

AO: I joined the Japanese community's Boy Scout troop, Troop 123, which met at a Methodist church downtown. We formed the drum and bugle corps, so we used to get together and play at various festivities, and we played in the Rose Parade here in Portland. We were invited up to play in the Seafair Parade that they had up there every summer. I didn't make it up there because I had the mumps at the time, so I didn't get to make that trip. But I played the bell lyre because I had taken piano lessons, and so I knew all about the musical notes, and so I played the bell lyre in the drum and bugle corps.

JK: Did your parents have expectations about keeping Japanese culture alive in you and Minnie, or did they talk about how you have to be Japanese and how you have to American?

AO: I don't think that was stressed very much. My parents took my sister and me to Japan when we were, I think I was four, five, six years old or something, and we stayed there for maybe less than a year. But other than that, they did not emphasize anything about Japan or Japanese culture. I think they pretty much assumed that we were going to be assimilated into the regular U.S. American culture.

JK: When you went to Japan, do you have any memories of that? You were like six years old, you said. Can you remember anything? Did it impress you?

AO: I can't remember anything except one thing, and that was that they had all these shoji screens in Japan, and I can remember pointing my finger and poking my hole through the shoji screens and getting bawled out by my parents and their brothers and sisters. That's all I can remember about Japan. [Laughs]

JK: So they spent a while there with family, and you were able to meet family, but you were very little then?

AO: Yes.

JK: How did you travel? Was it by ship?

AO: Yes, it was by ship.

JK: What do you remember about that trip? Was it long?

AO: I don't remember much at all.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.