Identity elements
Reference code
Name and location of repository
Level of description
Item
Title
Letter from Homer Yasui to Renichi Fujimoto, 08 January 1931
Date(s)
- 1931-01-08 (Creation)
Extent
letters (correspondence); manuscripts (documents); 1 page
Name of creator
Biographical history
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.
Content and structure elements
Scope and content
Letter from Homer Yasui to his uncle, Renichi Fujimoto, dated January 8, 1931. Homer writes that Renichi should come home soon and bring presents. Homer also asks him to bring home his Aunt.
Translation Note: This document is also available as the original manuscript document and as a Japanese translation.
System of arrangement
Conditions of access and use elements
Conditions governing access
In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC-NC/1.0/
Physical access
Technical access
Conditions governing reproduction
Languages of the material
- English
Scripts of the material
Language and script notes
Finding aids
Acquisition and appraisal elements
Custodial history
Immediate source of acquisition
Appraisal, destruction and scheduling information
Accruals
Related materials elements
Existence and location of originals
Yasui family papers, 1873-2023; Coll 949, Box 1, Folder 29, Item 1
Existence and location of copies
Related archival materials
Related descriptions
Notes element
Specialized notes
Alternative identifier(s)
Description control element
Rules or conventions
Sources used
Access points
Subject access points
Place access points
Name access points
- Fujimoto, Renichi, 1883-1965 (Contributor)