Oral History Program Alice Hirai Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Johnson 29 August 2014 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Alice Hirai Interviewed by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Johnson 29 August 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Immigrants at the Crossroads - Ogden City is a project to collect oral histories, photographs and artifacts related to the immigrant populations that helped shape the cultural and economic climate of Ogden. This project will expand the contributions made by Ogden’s immigrant populations: the Dutch, Italian and Greek immigrants who came to work on the railroad and the Japanese who arrived after World War II from the West Coast and from internment camps. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hirai, Alice, an oral history by Lorrie Rands and Melissa Johnson, 29 August 2014, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Alice Hirai Alice Hirai August 29, 2014 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Alice Hirai. It was conducted August 29, 2014 and concerns her time growing up in an internment camp, and her eventual move to Ogden. She also talks about the Japanese community in Ogden and the impact of the internment of Japanese Americans on society, both in America and Japan. The interviewers are Lorrie Rands and Melissa Johnson. LR: It is August 29, 2014. We are at Weber State University in the Stewart Library, in the Waterstradt Room here with Alice Hirai. We are interviewing Alice Hirai about her growing up, spending some time in the Topaz Camp, and her recent visit to Japan. Melissa Johnson is here too. Okay, so let’s just dive in, and let’s do the “when and where were you born,” Alice. AH: I was born in San Francisco, California, November 8, 1939. LR: Okay. And how long were you in San Francisco before you were moved? AH: Let’s see. I was born in ’39 and Pearl Harbor attack was December ’41, and then that following spring, I went to a temporary assembly hall in Tanforan horse stables—that was spring of ’42, after President Roosevelt signed that Executive Order 9066. We were in Tanforan until the fall of 1942 because the ten camps were not completely built yet. Finally the ten camps were completed and we got on the train and we went to Topaz. I was three-and-a-half years. At the end of the war, our family stayed in Salt Lake City for a year, and then we returned to San Francisco. LR: So, what are your memories of being in the Topaz camp? 2 AH: I always give credit to my parents and that generation, because I didn’t remember it being harsh at all. I just remember it as a normal three-and-a-half, four-year-old child, and just having a lot of fun with my friends and going to temporary Buddhist temple in the camp, and just having a good time. It was later on, after the war, and everything I realized what really happened. But that’s the reason why whenever I give presentations on the discrimination of Japanese Americans, I give the older generation a lot of credit, because they wanted to protect us children and they gave us a real good legacy to live by; they helped us to survive the harshness of the discrimination. It was hard and harsh. LR: So, when you say it was “harsh” for the older—like your parents—their time where was harsh? AH: One of the things that, I don’t know if any of the other gentlemen mentioned it, but after the war, most Japanese Americans did not want to talk about the experience. They wanted to sweep it under the carpet and just go on with their lives. So it’s really sad there’s that chapter of history—Japanese Americans— that there’s not a whole lot written or spoken about it. And whenever they talked about it, they were almost kind of forced into it. My parents were the same way: they never talked about it. In a lot of ways it’s good, because they just wanted to go on with their lives. But anyway, my mother said that the trip on the train from Tanforan to Topaz, they had my family; that was my father, my mother, my infant brother, and I, when I was three and a half. The other two children were born after the war. We had to walk through a white person’s car and the adults in that car yelled at 3 us and called us, “Dirty Japs—go back to where you came from!” And they started spitting at us. My mother felt really hurt by that experience and she said she’ll never forget that. She never brought that subject up again, but she said it was really hurtful. Another example is when President…well, I have to go back to 1938. J. Edgar Hoover, he was like Roosevelt, he didn’t like the Japanese Americans. Along the west coast of the Japanese community, now there are about 126,000 of us along the west coast from Canada down to Mexico, but he had the FBI agents monitor our leaders and that would include our Buddhist ministers, successful business owners, influential leaders, Japanese-American Christian leaders, but nobody knew this was going on at the time and when Pearl Harbor hit December 7, 1941, the agents hit the doorsteps of all of these leaders and took them away without any warning at all. The families didn’t know that was going to happen, and when it did happen, the men and the families didn’t know if they were ever going to see each other again. These men were sent to prison in the South and they were in these prisons for the entirety of the war, and some of them were tortured and beaten but hardly any of them ever talked about it, but we know from documents that that’s what happened. I have to talk about my cousin Grace. She was in San Francisco with us and she remembers everything because she was fifteen, so she gave me a lot of documents and stories, and so I have that information and that’s what my presentations are based on is what she told and gave me. But there’s a picture of a band playing as we’re leaving from Tanforan to Topaz and I said, “Gee, Grace, 4 this is kind of odd that, this is such a terrible experience, and why is the band playing?” And she said, “Well, you have to understand that the morale was really low and in order to keep the spirits up they had the band playing.” A lot of pictures that I have of us in camp, the adults around us are always smiling and it’s because they wanted the children to be happy. LR: Were your parents, were they from Japan or were they born here in America? AH: My father was born in Japan, but my mother and the rest of us were born here in the United States. When the adults were spitting at us on that train, they told us to go back to where we came from, well, we’re all from San Francisco and my father’s the only one from Japan. LR: That is what I was wondering was where is “back from where you came from” if that’s just San Francisco. And your parents never really talked about their experiences other than that one little tidbit your mother shared. AH: Yes, I don’t really remember them being bitter. But my father was a positive person and he made a comment that my brother remembers is, when we went to camp, my father said, “Well, this isn’t too bad. At least we have food to eat and a bed to sleep on.” So that was his philosophy to manage what was happening. LR: And that’s something he shared with his kids, this idea that at least we’re together? Do you think that helped? AH: Yes, it did. See we were fortunate because my father was not a leader so he stayed with us, so we as a family unit we were able to be together. He was a good father; my mother was a good mother. The other thing—my father worked in the mess hall where we ate. The Topaz barracks—each barrack had about six 5 apartments, each apartment didn’t have any utilities other than a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. So we didn’t have any place to cook or do our dishes or washing or anything like that. But we ate in the mess hall and he was hired as a cook. We had a choice of eating with the community or bringing it home and eating as a family unit. So, my parents are kind of private people, so my father, when he would finish cooking, he would grab a meal in a Japanese scarf, it’s called furoshiki, it’s kind of a like a picnic basket but it’s made out of a scarf. He would bring home each meal. My brother and I adored my father, so whenever he came home with the meal we’d be so excited to see him we’d be jumping up and down and saying, “Daddy! Daddy!” and we’d run and wrap our arms around his legs and then we would eat as a family. So, I just remember those kinds of things. All the people that came to Topaz were from the bay area. Really interesting history: San Francisco was headquarters for the Buddhist Churches of America. So when World War II started and we came to camp, Topaz became the headquarters of the Buddhist Churches of America, and we were pretty active. There were more Buddhists than the Christian followers and so we would celebrate our festivals in Topaz. One of the big festivals we had was the Obon festival during the summer where we do the outside folk dancing. Now we do the dancing and drumming. But I remember as young as three, I started learning to dance the dances and I still do the same dances that I learned in Topaz that we do now in the Salt Lake and the Ogden Buddhist Temples too. And I just 6 remember the leaders in our churches, I remember them when we went back to San Francisco. The other thing that’s really interesting about the Japanese community coming from the bay areas—the bay area is where two prominent medical schools were: UC Berkley and University of California in San Francisco. Japanese-American students, nurses and physicians came to Topaz. So what happened is we had a very good medical facility and provided one of the best medical care in the state of Utah because Topaz had all these physicians and nurses and nursing instructors. So the local physicians’ small towns, like Delta and Fillmore, with difficult cases would consult with the physicians in the medical society in Topaz. So I thought that was interesting because I’m a nurse. LR: So, you said your family went back to San Francisco; how long were you there in San Francisco? AH: Let’s see, I’m thinking—I go by what grade I was in—I think we were there for another four years, then we came back here. My first language was Japanese because in San Francisco we had a lot of first generation, second generation (Issei and Nisei). They all spoke Japanese. When we went back to San Francisco, I was extremely shy, and I can’t believe it because I’m not shy at all anymore. Anyway I was really shy and the next thing I knew when I started school I was in a classroom of people with disabilities, and I thought, “What am I doing in here?” Of course I was too young to understand and the next thing I knew then I went into a regular classroom, but I think because I was shy and I didn’t speak very good English that they thought I had a disability. I bring that up 7 because in the education system, the faculty and administration has to be real sensitive to people—children—who come from a different background and understand that their main language might hinder them in getting an appropriate education. LR: Do you recall if it was difficult, your integrating back into San Francisco after being in Topaz? AH: You know, I don’t remember that. See, one of the things that really helped us survive is the legacy of the first generation and second generation—my father was first generation, my mother was second generation. The legacy is no matter how we are discriminated upon and spit on or whatever, we need to keep our dignity and we have to study hard and work hard and everything will work out, and that proved to be the case. So my generation, most of us are quite successful; we’re responsible citizens. So, can I talk about Japan? LR: Yes, I was going to get there, so if you want to talk about that now go ahead. AH: So when I went to Japan this summer, and I spoke to an audience of 1,400 scattered all over Japan, I would talk about this and I said, “But your culture here in Japan is a culture that was passed onto the first generation that came to America.” So I gave credit to the Japanese people, the culture that they came up with, that legacy: keep your dignity, study hard, work hard, and those are really important teachings. It seems so simple, but it really stuck really well. As I taught my kids that and, my son, he may not keep his dignity, because he’s a born comedian. But anyway, we have a lot of fun. LR: What brought your family back to Utah? 8 AH: Okay, this goes back to a little bit of history, too. My uncle—I have two uncles that were taken away on the day of Pearl Harbor because they were influential leaders in San Francisco. My uncle, his name was Edward Kanto Fujimoto. He and his father from the early 1920s started a grocery store in San Francisco. They were very successful, and my uncle started the first miso factory, made the first miso in United States right there in little Japanese-town in San Francisco. Miso is a condiment, one of the basic condiments of Japanese food. If you go to Japanese restaurants, you could have miso soup, and some salads have miso dressing. In fact, they sell it in the stores now. But he made the first one. Then of course World War II took him to prison, but after World War II—now, I was a little girl so I’m thinking of all these things happening and I’m kind of putting two and two together—my uncle Fujimoto and his wife Rae Fujimoto, she’s my mother’s sister, they established a home in Salt Lake City. I remember going with my aunt and uncle to one of the prominent leaders of the Mormon church, his name was George Sims, and he lived in the Avenues near the state capitol and I remember them really well because they were really nice, kind, people. Every time I went they gave me special candy. So, as a little girl, you get this little special thing and you remember that. But I think what happened is my uncle might have gotten a loan from George Sims to start a factory in Salt Lake City and so he started his miso factory in Salt Lake City and became very successful. He supplied all the groceries and restaurants nationally miso. He depended on his mother who helped at the factory and then she passed away and so he needed help. We were in San Francisco for those few 9 years, and he asked my father to come back and help him so that’s how we came back to Salt Lake City and that’s when we moved to Salt Lake and I started my junior high and high school in Salt Lake City. That’s how I ended up at West High School and then went to University of Utah. LR: Now you live here in Ogden? AH: Yes. I met my husband, he’s from Idaho, when I was a junior in high school, but we got married when I graduated from nursing at the University of Utah. He was more practical than me; I was just a romantic person and I fell in love and wanted to get married right away but he was more practical and down-to-earth and he said, “No, you got to get your degree.” He had a medical problem so it’s almost like he was seeing the future, what’s going to happen to our lives if it takes his life. But anyway, I did get my degree and then we got married and then he was living in Ogden, so we moved to Ogden and that’s how I came to Ogden in 1962 and I’ve been here ever since. LR: When you came here to Ogden was there still a prominent little Japanese community like there had been in the forties that Shinji talks about? AH: Yes. LR: So you still had that sense of community here? AH: Yes. LR: Okay, and what was that like? AH: It was nice; a lot of the first and second generation were still alive and the Buddhist Temple was around the corner on Lincoln between 23rd and—no, what was it? Between 24th and 25th. Then we were active in the Buddhist Temple. My 10 husband was real active; he became a leader, he was well liked, respected by the Japanese community as well as the Caucasian community, too. We had our Obon festival. I talked about dancing outside. We had our flower festival in April where we celebrate the birth of the Buddha and have a program. It’s just like the Christmas programs for Christian families during Christmas-time. We have programs with children performing and all of that. And then we had the grocery store that the Endos owned. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed anybody about that—where the father was killed by a burglar, shot and killed? MJ: Did Shinji say something? AH: He might have mentioned it. Kunye Oda was raised— LR: Linda Oda, I’ve heard this story. AH: She was born and raised right there and her father was shot and killed and so her mother had to raise their children, I think there were five children, by herself and trying to run the grocery store and the children took over. Because of the difficulties going on there’s a reason why the children were determined to get their education, and that’s how Linda became a professor of education. LR: That’s right. AH: Then there was the restaurant: Star Noodle was run by the Ryujin family. Across the street was Roy Nakatani’s appliance store. He had a large family. There were all of these Japanese businesses along 25th Street and everybody knew each other and, yes, we did have a very close community. LR: Where exactly did you live when you moved to Ogden? 11 AH: Let’s see, I lived in almost the corner of… well, it was the corner of Van Buren and 27th. We lived in a triplex and then we had our first baby born there and then we bought a duplex in South Ogden and had our children. Then we were—my husband was an architect and we were building a home in Slaterville, but in the meantime we moved to a duplex in Harrisville, housing there, lived there for about a year until our house was built in Slaterville and then we moved there and raised our kids. My husband died in 1984 and our home was too much for me to take care of. Our property was 2.5 acres. I remarried but divorced soon after I moved out of there and moved into a duplex in North Ogden for a while, and then I found a condo on 12th Street, so that’s where I live now. I have a significant other right now, Sigh Hernandez. MJ: So, I just wanted to kind of go back just a little bit. You said your father came from Japan and your mother’s family was already here. How did they meet? AH: It was arranged. And then somehow through conversation, I found out that when my father met my mother it was love at first sight, because my mother was so beautiful, even though it was arranged. MJ: So, did he come to the U.S. because that was arranged or was that after? AH: After. MJ: And what did he do for a living here? AH: Let’s see. In San Francisco he went into the laundry business. Yes, he had kind of a sponsor and his name was Mr. Suzuki and my father came with a good friend and Mr. Suzuki was encouraging all the young Japanese, young men in that area, to come because you’ll make money and you’ll do fine working in the 12 cleaning/laundry business in San Francisco. There was a lot of small ma and pop businesses in Japanese-town, so he had a job here and there. MJ: So, when did your mother’s family come to the U.S.? AH: I think they came earlier. I think my grandfather, he was married before—they’re both from Hiroshima—seemed like he was married, something happened to his first wife and then he married my grandma. I think they were married in Japan and then they came here together. My grandfather came from a Samurai family and he had money and he had prestige, so when he came to San Francisco he was not, what am I trying to say, he was not like most isseis, first generation; he had money and he bought property in the Japanese-town area. He had about two large apartment buildings and he rented them out to the Japanese community, so he accumulated quite a bit of money and I understand that the family was quite prestigious in the Japanese community, well respected. And my grandma, I never remember her, but she died right about the time were in Tanforan. I don’t remember Tanforan. I remember Topaz. But my grandmother died in Tanforan. She died of—that was another harsh thing that happened—she was diagnosed with stomach cancer probably right around the time Pearl Harbor hit and so the family wanted her to stay in San Francisco because Tanforan was filthy. It was a horse stable for horse racing and we had to live in horse stables where there were remnants of manure and bad odor. She was by herself in San Francisco. She didn’t speak any English and so it was the last few days of her life and she wanted to be with the family so we sent for her. 13 This is all told to me by my cousin Grace because I don’t remember that and she told me that two men in a truck or a car brought my grandma and they just dumped her on the dirt road there, they didn’t even help her to get up, she was too weak to get up, and so the family went and pretty much rescued her and put her in a hospital, close by small hospital, and she died about a week or two later. So that really devastated the family and it makes me real angry because I’m a nurse and think gosh, you know, no matter how much I hate people I wouldn’t treat a patient like that. It makes me really want to be a better nurse because of that. MJ: What were your parent’s names? We should probably get names. AH: My father just had a Japanese name, and it’s really long, but you go by what it sounds like. You pronounce each consonant and vowel, so it’s Takasaburo. Very masculine name. And my mom had English and Japanese names just like us, the children. Let’s see, my mom’s name is Lillian Sakae, which sometimes she puts “ye.” I like to put the “ye,” then people know to separate the consonants. And her Japanese name was Nakamoto. My father’s last name is Sekino. So, when I went to Japan to his birthplace I wanted to look up Sekino. The only problem is, seven out of ten family’s names are Sekino. MJ: A very popular name. AH: Everybody in that little village knows each other and here comes a stranger and a mentor and we’re trying to find out about my family, and they were really rude to us because they didn’t know who we were and they go, “Well, I’m not going to talk to you. I don’t answer any questions to strangers.” But that’s the way they 14 are; they’re not used to seeing new people. I did get some documents and I might have to meet with the Consulate-General of Japan here to get some of the documents straightened out. I found out that my brother Warren and I have dual citizenship. We are citizens of Japan and then we are citizens of the United States and, oh this is not nice to say, but I run into people who are rednecks in this area, you probably run into rednecks, I’m ready to strangle them. I ran into some rednecks a few days ago and they were up in arms thinking that probably I’m going to cause a war or something because I’m a citizen of Japan. MJ: It’s kind of like, wait, haven’t we already been through this? AH: And people in Japan are fine. But anyway we do have rednecks and this one lady just recently keeps thinking that I was born and raised in Japan and I’ve known her for a long time. I said, “Listen, I’m an American citizen.” I’m sorry; I have to put that in. I love people here but there’s some people who are very, very, naïve. Like I say, I don’t hold back, and it’s in the community where they have gatherings and they discuss news articles, they learn things. So I told the lady who conducts that—and she’s a very well-educated person—I said, “I suggest you talk about sensitivity of people with color,” and she says, “That’s a good idea.” MJ: So, where was your father born in Japan? AH: Oh, he was born in Kanagawa Prefecture in the town of Odawara. He came to the USA in 1928 and I think he was about 28. But anyway, the problem—looking up history is a problem because names of cities have changed. They reversed it 15 or something, so it’s really hard to find exactly—and the boundaries have changed. But it was a lot of fun. There was a host family there. Oh a really, really cute family. The Kamo family and they had young children, Watarusan, a nice name, two years old. He wanted to hold my hand and I loved it because it reminded me of my grandkids I miss. His three-year-old sister was just as cute. They hosted Tomokosan and I around that area. LR: So, talking about Japan, what was one of the reasons why you wanted to go back? AH: Well, it was my mentor Tomoko Tanaka, she’s a very learned person, she’s a physician in Japan, she’s married to a physician that practices at University of Utah ICU and she’s raising two children and she wanted to learn more about the history of Japanese Americans. She heard about me that I go around speaking about it so she came to me and then she had me speak to her children’s classroom and she really liked my presentation and she goes, “You know, Alice, the people in Japan need to hear your story. Would you like to go to Japan?” I didn’t even have to think twice about it because I thought to myself, “I’m seventy-four and I’m not getting any younger and something might happen to me and I might not have a chance.” I said yes, and she’s the one that made all the arrangements to speak to all these venues, I mean she’s just remarkable. MJ: I’ve got questions that are kind of bouncing all over the place and so I hope that that’s okay. But going back to Topaz, did you go to school there at all? 16 AH: I went to preschool because I have a picture of that, but I think I started kindergarten when I was, well I was five when I left, and started kindergarten in Salt Lake City right where the church office is, right there on North Temple and State Street, right around there. There used to be an elementary school there called Lafayette and I went there as a kindergartner. But in Topaz I was in preschool and I still have that picture and it’s really a fun picture to look at because none of the kids are looking at the camera. There’s a kid standing behind me and I remember him. He lived in the same block in Topaz. His father was taken away because he was a Buddhist minister and so his mother was left with two sons. I don’t know if the mother had any children after. I remember the youngest son, his name is Tetsuden and he’s a little bit younger than I am. I remember him because he was a mean kid. He bit my finger and it hurt. I remember crying. And my brother remembers him because he used to throw toys at my brother’s head. And now Tetsuden is a successful professor at University of Washington in Asian Studies and what’s ironic is, our world is really small. I talked about this in, oh, Gakushuin University, which is a very prestigious university in Japan. That’s where the Emperor’s family send their children and relatives. So, I’m speaking about Tetsuden and there’s a student sitting in front of me and she knows him. I go, “You’ve got to be kidding!” She’s good friends with Tetsuden’s wife because his wife is from Japan. MJ: I can imagine being a young child and your father taken away from your home. AH: There’s no discipline. He was a brat. 17 MJ: Probably some anger unfortunately took out on you and your brother. You said you remember it as being very fun there at the camp; what did you guys do for fun? What do you remember? AH: Oh, we would play, I remember playing house and doctor and patient and we would do hide-and-seek and just basic things like that. Oh, went to the movies. We saw Snow White at, I think, the high school had a big gymnasium and we would go there for entertainment and things like that. The young people enjoyed it because it was concentrated with their own kind. Back home they are sparsely scattered so they didn’t have a chance to get together but in Topaz they were all —in fact there was some juvenile delinquency happening because they had gangs and they had gang fights and things like that too. But I wasn’t into that; I was just too young, I don’t remember much. MJ: So then did the adults go and work on the local farms or anything like that? AH: Maybe a handful of them. I think a few of them did, because even people that lived up here in Weber County said that some people from camp came up and helped in the farming and they got along really good and everything. The information I am giving you now about Topaz is what I learned later as I grew older and read history books and interviewed key people. In Topaz there were forty-two blocks, and each block governed itself; I think they had committees. People had assignments, just like my father working in the mess hall, so we kind of ran our own places. I read later after a few months into camp life a lot of the military sentries were gone because we were honest. Where would we run to? They built these away from railroad and highways and a lot of us didn’t have 18 homes to go back to because they were all taken, all our property was gone and so we just stayed there and just did the best we could until the war was ended. Then when the war was ended—see I didn’t know this, too, because nobody talked about it—but we were given twenty-five dollars each and when they closed the gates of the camps we were all homeless; we didn’t have a place to sleep or a place to eat. Some of us were fortunate; they had charitable organizations and had us arranged to go to some of the churches and YWCA and that. See, that explains in my head after the war I go to the temples in San Francisco and Salt Lake City and families are living in these places and I thought, “That’s weird that people live in churches. I wonder why.” But now I know. They were there until they were able to get back on their feet; fathers finding jobs and buying homes and all that. That’s probably what happened. MJ: We don’t think about that transition too much, you know, right after you leave the camp and where you go and what you do. AH: No one talked about it. I have a scholar here, his name—have you interviewed the Koka family? MJ: I don’t remember. LR: No, I don’t think so. AH: Steve Koka, he’s a scholar. His mother was in Topaz and she married a Koka brother here in Ogden and he’s very ill now. He doesn’t do a lot of volunteer like he used to but he knows the history really well and he has a wonderful display of Topaz and history of Japanese Americans. But any time I have any questions or anything I consult with him, so he’s given me part of this history that I didn’t know 19 because I didn’t know anything about this until after the war. He says, “That’s true. We were all homeless. We were only given twenty-five dollars.” MJ: So was it just easier then for your family to just come to Salt Lake and try to find a place to live there rather than trying to get back to San Francisco right away? AH: We went back and the place was trashed. What happened is when we left, a lot of the blue collar workers went with us to camp. So they hired a lot of African Americans from the South and these are people who didn’t have jobs. They came up here and they lived in our apartments that my grandfather owned; they pretty much trashed it. But at least we had a place to go back to; a lot of people didn’t have any place to go back to but we had a place to go back. So we had our own discrimination: Japanese people, because of how African Americans were in San Francisco when we went back, we were discriminating against African Americans. Of course we all know better now when you look back on it. MJ: So you said you had two siblings born after the war? What were their names? AH: Irene Tamei, she was named after my grandma who died of stomach cancer, Japanese name. She was born—well, my mother was pregnant with her when we left camp and then she was born May after we left for Salt Lake City while we were living in that duplex, and then my brother was born, David…how come I can’t remember his Japanese name? My mind is going. Anyway, he was born in San Francisco and he was born ten years after, so he was born in 1949. MJ: So you said that your grandparents were from Hiroshima. I’m curious, of course, when then the atomic bomb is dropped there and in Nagasaki, were you aware at all of their reactions of how they felt about it? 20 AH: Well, they came here before Hiroshima. MJ: Yes, but to kind of think about their home where they had been. Was it something they just didn’t talk about? AH: They didn’t talk about it. No one ever has brought it up. But while I was in Hiroshima this last summer I met a distant relative in Hiroshima. Part of our presentation was in Hiroshima. That was an awesome experience. Anyway, her name was Michiko Hamai and her family was there when the bombing occurred and she wrote a book about it. What happened is her husband’s cousin was one of the writers of this book. His name was Bob Yamada and his brother, Richard Yamada’s son, is married to my daughter in Chicago. And so we’re all kind of loosely tied together, but Michiko was there at my presentation and she gave me that book she wrote and it was really remarkable. She goes clear back to way before—I think she goes clear back to the 19th century—yeah, Meiji era in Japan, and how her cousin in the Hiroshima area, they made enough money and some of them immigrated to the Unites States and some of them stayed and they stayed before the war, during the war, and then ending with the Hiroshima bombing. She writes about family that survived it and what the beautiful home—I mean Hiroshima was just totally flattened out other than the dome, that famous dome that you see in the pictures. So as far as Hiroshima experience, that’s as close as I’ve gotten to the experiences through Michiko Hamai. I had a tour of the Peace Garden right where the epicenter was, and that was a very moving experience; I cried. I felt so bad for the children, the innocent children. I bought a couple, three books and read about it. I can’t believe that we 21 ever did that and I’m thinking about even now with the nuclear competition between Russia and United States, that it would take Obama or Putin to just say one word and our whole universe, our whole—it’s not going to be just one city— humankind’s going to be destroyed, because that’s what happened for Truman. It was so easy for him to say, “Go ahead,” and he destroyed a whole city. It’s so destructive; we’ve got to do something. There’s a Barbara Reynolds in Hiroshima a few years after the bombing and she started a movement and it’s still going right now about finding peace in the world. MJ: My last questions, is kind of coming back to Ogden and your involvement with the Buddhist Temple. So, it was originally downtown and now it’s out in Harrisville, correct? Are you still very involved with that community there? AH: Yes. MJ: We don’t really know much about the Buddhist community here. So I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit of some history about that church and when it moved out to Harrisville and so forth. AH: So, it came from the Kyoto area because that’s where our headquarters are. The ministers and the lay people came here to the United States and started the Jodo Shinshu churches. Then they also came to Utah’s farmers and they started their own temple. A lot of the services were in the homes, then eventually they established a temple on Lincoln. I don’t know what year that was established. They had their own board members; they had their Sunday School. The Salt Lake and Ogden Buddhist Temple had their own ministers, but eventually it was 22 too costly and ministers were becoming more scarce, so the… [break in recording] MJ: Okay, we’re recording again. We were talking just before we had to change the memory card, we were talking about the history of the Buddhist temple in Ogden and you were saying that ministers were becoming more scarce. AH: The Salt Lake minister had to start sharing their time up here, and nationally it became the same story. So one of the things that they found that was becoming more practical was training lay people in the temple to run the church, like setting up the altar for services and answering families who need some help, spiritual help. So they became assistant ministers and I don’t think they had to go to Japan, but they got some training here and then they go to San Francisco to be ordained as assistant ministers. Right now we have about four assistant ministers and Salt Lake has one. The wife of Reverend Jerry Hirano of Salt Lake, she’s an assistant minister and she’s going to Japan and I think she’s going to become an ordained minister. She’s a psychiatrist, you know, so she comes up and gives us sermons and things like that too. We have a very active organization locally and nationally. We have, it used to be called the Fujinkai, that’s because we—it’s a Japanese term for “women’s organization” because it was first and second generation—but now a lot of the members are mixed colors now, so we call them the Buddhist Women’s Organization [Association] (BWA). They’re really the strong organization that keeps the church together because they’re in the kitchen preparing special meals for special occasions and, well women do the legwork and nurturing and 23 everything, so they keep the temple together. A lot of the men become leaders, but then the women are taking over too now so that’s really good. We have the Young Buddhist Association. There the young Buddhist members become trained as leaders and sometimes you send one or two to Japan to have that experience. A lot of them are, you know, grandchildren, like my grandchildren are half-Japanese and half-Caucasian and so a lot of families have mixed ethnicity, which is really good. We get lots of visitors in our temple and our local newspaper, the Standard-Examiner, is really supportive and they always want to know what’s coming up and they have it written in the newspaper so we get quite a bit of support that way. Oh, we have our weekly services. Summer time we have a sabbatical because a lot of people go on vacations, but we do have that big celebration of the Obon festival with the outside street dancing and drumming. Oh and that’s another thing: we have a very active Taiko drumming group. It’s a very powerful music because we play the drums with martial arts movements and it’s all precision, so when you watch it the sound is real powerful and the movements are very powerful too. MJ: Yeah, I’ve been out to the festivals a couple of years ago. AH: And this is a Taiko movement that was started years ago by Seichi Tanaka. He was in Japan and was a Taiko player and he came to San Francisco and he wanted to start a Taiko here in the United States so we call him the father of American Taiko. He started this in the sixties and he started off with students in San Francisco and he’s still doing that, but he’s a very strict disciplinarian. Out of 24 that initial group the students have branched out and established their own Taiko group; one is Mas Kodani in L.A.; Kenny Endo in Hawaii; Roy and P.J. Hirabayashi in San Jose. But these are all really very good groups and they’ve spread out and taught other groups. I mentioned the Koga family. Steve Koga’s sister, Sharon, moved to L.A. because she’s a music person and she wanted to expand her music background; she became a Taiko player with Mas Kodani. She came back to Utah and taught our Ogden group, the first group, to play Taiko. The original group are gone. The young parents in Ogden Buddhist Temple wanted the Taiko group in Ogden again, so they asked Stan, my son, and Betty Yamada—both of them from the initial group—to start a group here, so they’ve been teaching Taiko for over twenty years consistently, so we have a very active Taiko group; very disciplinarian. My son has his unique way of teaching. I mean you have to come and see what he gets away with. He yells at everybody but nobody takes him seriously, so he makes it a lot of fun. That is an experience in itself to watch him teach Taiko. I’m shaking my head. MJ: Oh, I was going to ask you just so we have it recorded, what was your husband’s name and children’s names? AH: Okay, my husband’s name was Mack Susumu Hirai. He came from Idaho and a farm family. They didn’t have to be in camps because they were not a threat, not seen as being disloyal, but then they had their own suffering. He’d go to school and get beaten up, but he also became tough because he started beating them back. 25 I have three children. I mentioned my son the Taiko instructor, Stan Kazo Hirai, and he’s forty-nine years old. My middle daughter Marlane Natsuye— Natsua means summer—she was born with a disability. My husband and I, while he was alive, we fought ten years for people with disabilities because my daughter didn’t have an adequate education. My husband and I were trained by strong advocates of people with disabilities that this was what we need to do to get things for Marlane, so we fought for ten years against Ogden City-Weber School District. I say this publicly that they were like fighting the Mafia and I became a very strong voice. That’s the reason why I don’t shy away from being an advocate for people who can’t speak for themselves. After ten years, she did get an adequate education, so did the others. We were given awards for doing that and then my husband passed away, but I kept the movement going by myself. We have a group home going, very successful. She lives in a real nice group home and it’s been wonderful for her and I, because now we both have a life. If I had her at home I wouldn’t be able to do things like this, I’d have to get someone to babysit and all that. She has a life where she is making new friends and she goes to work, but she functions as a toddler so she needs 24/7 care because it’s dangerous when you think about a toddler being left alone. My youngest daughter, she’s thirty-seven years old, married, and lives in Chicago. She got her degree at Northwestern University and does really well. She went to Fremont High School here and my son went to Weber High. She’s one of the first graduating classes at Fremont High, and both of them did really well. 26 The best thing about Utah—even though it was after the war, I went to West High School and Junior High School, but I never felt any discrimination and I think it’s the LDS philosophy. The LDS were persecuted so they’ve been real tolerant with us and more compassionate. I go to a high school reunion and it’s the same compassionate friends that I have. So I don’t remember any harsh discrimination; there might have been subtle things, but I didn’t experience any overt kinds of things. We were fortunate to be here. MJ: I didn’t catch your youngest daughter’s name. AH: Alicia Sanaye Yamada. LR: Before I forget, you mentioned earlier that you would have an American name and then a Japanese name. Is that something that’s still very common? Will your children give their children two names? AH: Yes. Some families kind of split after the war; they didn’t want to be identified as being a Japanese at all. They just wanted to completely deny it so that they’re accepted. They stopped speaking Japanese, they didn’t want to have anything to do with names, culture. But our family, we were proud of being Japanese and we were never ashamed of it; in some ways, I was, but I wasn’t. And then our parents, especially my father from Japan, wanted our children to have Japanese names, so our children wanted their children to have Japanese names. So they’re naming, like Alicia my youngest one, their three children have Japanese names: Dylan Sanaye, named after her mother, and then Jaxon Susumu is named after Grandfather Mack Susumu Hirai. LR: Thank you for sharing this with us.