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

Inahara,Toshio

(b. 1921) Vascular surgeon

Encouraged to go to college

We applied for a travel permit to go to eastern Oregon and successfully were able to do that. But after 2 years of farming, we were pretty well established and my brother Yosh decided to go to school. And so he left after a couple of years and went to University of Michigan. And then I also wanted to get back to school and I applied to the University of Wisconsin. This was back in 1944. I was…had some second thoughts about leaving the farm because I felt responsible and we had something like 30 acres of onions to harvest and some potatoes to harvest after that and sugar beets to harvest after that. I just didn’t feel right in leaving, but my father finally talked me into going so I left just a week before the school started. And I can remember taking the train from Ontario to Chicago to Madison and I had…I carried just one suitcase. That was my sole possession.

agriculture colleges farming

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)