Radio interview with Homer Yasui and Jeff Uecker

Collection

Identifier: SR 946

Staff Only

Digitized interview recording

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Scope and Contents

Audio recording of an interview with Homer Yasui and Jeff Uecker that was conducted by Bob Griggs at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon, in January 1992. The interview was conducted for Oregon Public Broadcasting's Hotline radio program. This recording aired on the Portland radio station KOPB as part of the Golden Hours series, which was a reading service for blind and visually impaired people that ran from 1975 to 2009.

In this interview, Uecker, an Oregon Historical Society museum educator, discusses two exhibitions that were on display at the Oregon Historical Society at the time of the interview: “Strength and Diversity: Japanese American Women, 1885-1990” and “Kenjiro Nomura: an Artist's Interpretation of Japanese American Internment.” He also talks about upcoming events at OHS relating to the Japanese American experience in Oregon.

Yasui then discusses his donation of Yasui family papers to the Oregon Historical Society, and talks about some of the materials. He discusses the Yasui family's history in Hood River, Oregon, and his experience of incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II.

Dates

Creation: 1992 January

Creator

Yasui, Homer, 1924-2023 (Interviewee, Person)
Uecker, Jeffry Lloyd (Interviewee, Person)
Griggs, Bob (Robert) (Interviewer, Person)

Conditions Governing Access

Collection is open for research.

Conditions Governing Use

Use is allowed according to the following statement: In Copyright - https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Biographical note

Jeffry Lloyd Uecker was museum educator for the Oregon Historical Society during the 1990s.

Biographical note

Homer Yasui, the eighth child of Masuo and Shidzuyo Yasui, was born in Hood River, Oregon, in 1924. He lived in Hood River with his family until 1942, when the Yasui family were among more than 120,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated by the U. S. government during World War II. Along with other family members and friends and neighbors from Hood River, Homer Yasui, then a teenager, was sent to the Pinedale Assembly Center and then the Tule Lake Relocation Center in California. After advocacy by his mother, he was granted educational leave in the fall of 1942 to attend college in Denver, Colorado. He later attended medical school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1950, Homer Yasui married Miyuki Yabe (1926-2018), later known as Miki. He joined the Navy Medical Corps as a surgeon in 1954 and opened a long-running practice in the Portland, Oregon, area in 1958. The couple had three children: Barbara, Meredith (Meris) and John.

Homer Yasui joined the Portland chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in 1969. He served as its president in 1973 and as co-president with his wife, Miki Yasui, from 1980-1981. Both served as JACL board members throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and Homer Yasui was elected governor for the Pacific Northwest District Council of the organization in 1982. He also served as co-chair of the Portland JACL Committee for Redress, along with local attorney Peggy Nagae.

In the late 1980s, as Homer Yasui was retiring from medicine, he became the Yasui family's unofficial historian. Over the next 30 years, he performed extensive research on his own family and other Oregon-based Japanese American families, gathered additional documents through his network and Freedom of Information Act requests, and wrote about their lives before and after their wartime incarceration by the U.S. government. He also wrote a series of informal biographies and family histories titled "Passing it On," which he sent to family and friends. Homer Yasui died in 2023.

Extent

0.1 Cubic Feet (1 audiocassette (30 min., 8 sec.))

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Abstract

Radio interview with Homer Yasui and Jeff Uecker, conducted by Bob Griggs in January 1992 for Oregon Public Broadcasting's Hotline program. Uecker discusses exhibits and events about Japanese Americans in Oregon at the Oregon Historical Society in 1992. Yasui discusses his donation of Yasui family papers to the Oregon Historical Society, and talks about his experience of incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II.