Densho Digital Repository - Yoneko Watanabe Okamoto Interview

Densho Digital Repository
JACL Philadelphia Oral History Collection
Title: Yoneko Watanabe Okamoto Interview
Narrator: Yoneko Watanabe Okamoto
Interviewer: Herbert J. Horikawa
Location: Medford, New Jersey
Date: August 27, 1994
Densho ID: ddr-phljacl-1-7-5

<Begin Segment 5>

HH: I had this from another source, but I want to hear it from you. How did you meet Alan?

YO: Oh, it's kind of a long story. [Laughs] I came here, I had no friends. I had met this well-known artist, Neil Fujita, in camp. He had given me a picture. I happened to get to a art show, and he was in the service the same time Alan was, and I don't think he was in the same company. But they were very close together, and when he learned that I was coming to Philadelphia, he wrote to Alan, "This is my husband's mother." He was living in Willow Grove, which is a suburb of Philadelphia. And she came to visit me at 1620 Spruce where I was living, and found out that I was from Tokyo, Japan. She was from Yokohama, which is practically right next door to Tokyo, and invited me over for dinner. I went to the dinner, she liked me, and promised, asked me to correspond with Alan, write a letter. Well, I was not in the mood to write to strange men that I had never met. I did promise her, and I had intended to write to him, but never got around to writing to him. Japanese American Citizens League ran a Christmas dance at the YWCA, and I was part of the committee that helped decorate the place, and found out that there were quite a few men who had returned to the U.S., and part of them were the 442nd group, and they were to be our guests of honor. I thought, well, gee, I wonder if this person that I was supposed to write to by the name of Alan Okamoto was going to be there. I dated another person, went to the dance, saw him across the hall, and someone pointed out to me, "That's Alan Okamoto," because I had asked around to see if he was here at the dance. When I saw him, I said, "Oh, he's too short for me." [Laughs] And actually, we did not meet at the dance. This was close to Christmas. A week later, I attended a New Year's Eve party at a friend's, Shio Coriwye, this was the first time I had a chance to meet Alan Okamoto. This is how we met, we talked, I liked him, we started dating. That's how I met my husband.