My daughter couldn’t fit in Japan, so I decided to go back to America (Japanese)

Business in Missouri (Japanese) My daughter couldn’t fit in Japan, so I decided to go back to America (Japanese) Facing discrimination in America (Japanese)

Transcripts available in the following languages:

(Japanese) So I decided to go back to Japan for a while, and I did. I went back, but Japan wasn’t good, just as I expected. My older child came here when she was in the third grade, and she moved to the fourth grade and went back to Japan, to an elementary school in Honmoku in Yokohama. And she told me that they would have oden for lunch. And she just couldn’t like it. And my younger one didn’t like Japan so much that we decided to go to, go back to America. And in March, 1978, I got here with my suitcase and one bag. I went to a hotel in downtown LA by taxi from LAX, rented a car, drove, walked and found a house. It’s the house I live in now in Monrovia. And I said to myself, this is good enough, and told my family to send my stuff here, with cats and other things. We have two cats, they were born in Missouri and went to Yokohama and stayed there for 10 months and came back here in California. They’ve been with us since then.

Date: July 17, 2016
Location: California, US
Interviewer: Yoko Nishimura, Mitsue Watanabe
Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

california family Los Angeles migration

Get updates

Sign up for email updates

Journal feed
Events feed
Comments feed

Support this project

Discover Nikkei

Discover Nikkei is a place to connect with others and share the Nikkei experience. To continue to sustain and grow this project, we need your help!

Ways to help >>

A project of the Japanese American National Museum


The Nippon Foundation