Interviews

1. Father became trilingual to practice medicine

2. Typical day for the doctors

3. Discrimination for Nisei doctors

4. Recalls seeing her father off on a business trip with his surgery nurse

5. Finding out about her father's case

6. Making patients feel comfortable by using patient's regional dialects

Kaji,Frances Midori Tashiro

(1928–2016) Daughter of an Issei doctor　

Recalls seeing her father off on a business trip with his surgery nurse

I do remember once, before the war started, we went to Union Station down here in L.A. to see him off on a trip to San Jose with his surgery nurse. And they went on the overnight train to San Jose, and she took with her a certain set of surgery tools that she was supposed to hand-carry, and she was responsible for. And she told me about that a few years ago before she died, and I said, "I remember taking you down to the Union Station and wondering, 'How come you're going off with my daddy?'" you know. [Laughs]

Date: September 21, 2009

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Tom Ikeda, Martha Nakagawa

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Nisei female. Born April 30, 1928, in Los Angeles, California. She grew up in Gardena and her father was a prominent medical physician in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. During World War II, removed to the Poston incarceration camp, Arizona. Left camp with family to work on a sugar beet farm in Colorado, and eventually returned to Los Angeles, where father reestablished medical practice. She passed away in November 2016 at the age of 88. (April 2020)