Interviews

1. Family background

2. Driving 1930 Ford at age 12

3. Classified 4C - enemy alien

4. Inahara shunt

5. Encouraged to go to college

6. Father's career as a manjyu maker

7. Identified as Japanese ancestry

Toshio Inahara

(b. 1921) Vascular surgeon

Classified 4C - enemy alien

It was in January of ’42. I volunteered for the United States Air Force. And the requirements at that time were you had to have one year of college, which I just had. And had to pass a written examination and then the physical and so I was ready to be inducted and I went out to the air base and at that time, they rejected me because of my background, my ancestry. I appealed this rejection with my attorney – a fellow by the name of Paul Patterson, who was in Hillsboro and I’d known his because of our dealings in the past. Paul Patterson later became the governor of Oregon. He appealed for me, but it didn’t do any good. I was classified 4C the rest of the years.

I*: And 4C stands for?

Yeah.

I: What does 4C stand for?

Oh, it’s enemy alien.

* “I” indicates an interviewer (Akemi Kikumura Yano).

discrimination interpersonal relations racism United States Air Force

Date: December 6, 2005

Location: Oregon, US

Interviewer: Akemi Kikumura Yano

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Toshio Inahara was born in Seattle, Washington, the first of four brothers. At age three, he moved with his family to Japan, returning after six months to Tacoma where his father established a successful Japanese confectionery, “Fugetsu.” Toshio’s father wanted his sons to grow up in the country, so the family moved to a farm 30 miles west of Portland, Oregon, in 1931.

In response to Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, West Coast Japanese Americans were ordered to evacuate to Assembly Centers, but the Inahara family obtained a travel permit to relocate inland to Ontario, near the Eastern Oregon border. Toshio volunteered for service in the US Air Force in 1942, but was rejected because of his Japanese ancestry.

After two years of family farming, Toshio was accepted at the University of Wisconsin, where he studied pre-med courses, eventually earning his M.D. in 1950 from the University of Oregon. Following internship and residency, he trained in vascular surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and then returned to Portland to establish a private practice and serve as a clinical instructor in surgery at the University of Oregon Medical School.

Dr. Inahara is one of the world’s foremost authorities on carotid endarterectomy and is co-inventor of the Pruitt-Inahara Carotid Shunt.(December 6, 2005)