<Begin Segment 2>

HH: Will you give a brief history of your family's entry into the United States? Probably starting with your grandfather.

AI: Okay. Then you want to go into the story I talked about? Okay. My grandfather was educated. He's from Kagoshima, Japan, which is in the southern part of Japan, and they're kind of militaristic. I think they're in his era. And so they sent my grandfather to the West Point of Japan called Shikan Gakko, and he graduated there, I don't know when. But when he finished there, he started to teach in the military school, and I don't know whether this is true or not, but I've heard it so many times that it might be true. Is that when he was teaching a class, a superior officer came into his class and gave a karate chop over a student who was falling asleep and killed him. And the school tried to suppress it, but my grandfather refused to suppress it, and he quit the college and immigrated to this country, and that was in 1889 at age around twenty-four, twenty-five. And he traveled extensively. As my mother said, he traveled a lot, to the point where he may have been a spy, that he mapped the entire West Coast of the United States she thinks for the military of Japan. Because he went back to Japan when they had the war with Russia in 1905, which meant that he did not quit the military, that he was still part of the Japanese military because they still called them back for duty. When he did get back to Japan, the war with Russia was already over, so he came back to this country. So he started up a halfway house in downtown San Francisco, being a pretty educated man of Japanese descent, he operated a halfway house where these teenagers from Japan would come through this country and my father learning from all his, I guess, people that traveled through his halfway house where all the good jobs were within the United States. He would tell them where to go to find jobs in this country, and a lot of them would come back through his halfway house and tell him where all the good jobs where, and where all the newcomers coming from Japan where to go to find jobs to make money. And one was Mr. Shimomura who lives in Seabrook, his father used to praise my grandfather for finding him all the good jobs. And that was building the railroads across from Montana all the way to Minnesota. So he got enough money to buy a mountain, Mr. Shimomura, to buy a mountain in Japan, which was worth a lot of money to this day because he grew all these trees for lumber. So he made a lot of money there.

Anyway, in 1906, he got his hotel, it's built for my grandfather by these people traveling through his halfway house. And so he had a restaurant and an inn which he could house the people, and this was located down on Second Street, Second and Market in downtown San Francisco. But in 1906, he was in the earthquake and it wiped him out completely and leveled him, the fire especially, because they had oil lanterns back then. And just by the oil lanterns going over, the hotel went up in flames. But I remember him saying that the fire was so intense that the flow, the molten glass would go down the streets and create a lot more fires. But during that earthquake, my father was two years old, and he had an older brother two years older, four years old. And his younger brother Mit was only six months old during the earthquake. And so he had a big debt that he had to pay for. And so since he couldn't afford to raise his three children, his wife and he took my father and his two brothers back to Japan and his wife's side parents raised the three boys. But the one boy died of appendicitis, so there were only two left.

Okay, so my grandfather then, to pay for this big debt, got a job at a resort in Reno, Nevada. And they operated a hotel complex because he had experience in hotel work, so he and his wife worked for twenty years to pay off the debt. And at that time, he got religion. He got religion to the point where he really became a devout Christian. And then that was around 1922, in that era. Because they had a cutoff of Asians to this country during that period or my grandfather heard of it, he and his wife went back to Japan, picked up the two sons, because one had died, and brought them back to this country. And he sent the two boys to, well, the younger one had to finish high school in this country. And then my father was sent to a bible school in downtown Los Angeles. And then two years later, Mit, his brother, also went to two years of college at the bible college. And then my father said he quit because there was too much prejudice at the bible college, and so he returned to San Francisco, it was kind of a "city slickers" of San Francisco. Then they heard of these people down where my mother lived, down in Salinas, California, heard about my father. Because he was born in this country so he was a citizen of this country, although he was not educated in this country, he still was a citizen because he was born here. And they liked him because he could speak, he was bilingual. And then the people who wanted to buy the farms were also from Kagoshima, that same neck of the woods where my grandfather had come from, so they looked up my father, they offered my father the farm. Said, "If I could put, I think three or four farmers," if he could buy these farms for him, or put these farms under his name, they would give him this piece of property, I think around 40 acres or so. And so he farmed, my father became a farmer, and at that time, he met my mother who was a farmer at the time, because not one of those four farmers. And that's when they got married, so that's how, and then they got married in 1933, and I was born in 1934. So that brings us up to speed. I don't know if you want to get on my mother's side or not.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.