Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: Paul Uyehara Interview
Narrator: Paul Uyehara
Interviewer: Rob Buscher
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Date: May 22, 2023
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-24-13

[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]

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RB: I think we'll return to some of the questions around advocacy, but I want to talk a little bit about your family. You've mentioned this Mary a couple of times in the interview, but can you talk a little bit about how you came to meet your wife, and any anecdotes about...

PU: Okay, well, apparently, I did not meet her at Oberlin, and she won that argument. I still think if I ever go through some of my old boxes that have college papers, I'm going to find a flyer that has her name as a guest speaker, but she denies it. So the alternative story is that when I was a paralegal I did landlord/tenant work, so we represented tenants. And one of the things that we did, aside from like, representing individual tenants had disputes with their landlords, is sometimes we do like tenant education or outreach or assisting tenant organizations. So, one of the places where this kind of crossed over with community stuff was a lot of the Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in a really kind of poorly thought out way. Put into poor housing conditions, and bad neighborhoods, and so on. And so one of those places was Admiral Court in West Philadelphia. So we picked up some clients from there, and I remember we went out to the apartment house, and to meet with some of the tenants and look at some of their apartments to see what kind of condition it was in, and those conditions were pretty bad there. But in any event, my wife, Mary Yee, was also there. And you know, she was there kind of trying to help the tenants organize, and so that's the official story of where we met. And so that would have been... I guess that would have been in the 1980s. Yeah, like the early '80s.

RB: And how long were you two together before you decided to get married?

PU: Well, we kind of did things a little backwards. So she had a daughter at that time who was, like, two years old. We later had our son, Kaz, and things have been, a lot of kind of pandemonium with little kids throughout that period. And then me going to law school at night, which meant I had no free time for anything the whole time. So we got married after that, so after I graduated from law school, and that would have been 1990. So that's, Kaz would have been two at that time, and Olivia would have been like, seven, things were a little bit less crazy at that point, and I had a job and everything. So yeah, it's 1990.

RB: And I understand that you got married here at Shofuso. Can you describe the decision to be wed here and any memories that you might have of the actual wedding day?

PU: Well, my father was connected to Shofuso. I don't know if it was, it was probably at that time, he might have still been the president of Shofuso. And, you know, we were kind of struggling financially and living on the cheap, so we were thinking about where can we get married or have a gathering, gather together people, not cost a lot of money. And so we thought about this place, and said wow, it's beautiful there. I mean, it's a perfect setting to have a wedding, although it has to be a really small wedding because there's not much space there. And we got the approval to do it, and it was significant because nobody had been allowed to get married here, actually, on the grounds before that. And it was like it was a beautiful setting, it still is, and it's still kind of humorous. If you look at photos taken, like at the wedding, they almost look like they're fake because the background is so beautiful. You're like, oh, that must have been Photoshopped or something, because it's like a painting in the background, it's so pretty. But we had a very small ceremony that you could fit in this little space, and then we had a reception in Chinatown. And so it was it was nice.

RB: And so you mentioned that your father wedded in 1990. Do you recall how your parents first got involved in this space?

PU: No, I don't. [Laughs] I don't.

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