Interviews

1. Food growing up

2. Being on the outside

3. Working at the magazine

Wayne Shigeto Yokoyama

(b.1948) Nikkei from Southern California living in Japan.

Working at the magazine

When I first came to Japan, I was just an American living in Japan. And working at that Buddhist magazine was interesting because they had some very important teachers in there. This was an old, kind of an elite society of scholars and it’s very old-fashioned. Of course I know nothing about this and quite often, my behavior was completely out of line with what they expect. And so that was part of my difficulty working at that magazine. They expected me to be an old Japanese gentleman, which I am not. Or I was not at that time. This was the problem, was that I didn’t know how to behave correctly as a Japanese. And so as I was watching my kids grow up, I learned a lot of things from them about how to speak properly and how to behave and how to be more nice. So thanks to my kids, I am more cooperative now than I was 3 years ago! It’s just like clothes. You have to change your clothes. You can’t wear the same kind of clothes for 30 years. You have to wear new clothes.

Finding Home (film) immigration Japan journalism journalists racially mixed people

Date: November 13, 2003

Location: Kyoto, Japan

Interviewer: Art Nomura

Contributed by: Art Nomura, Finding Home.

Interviewee Bio

Wayne Shigeto Yokoyama was born in Hawaii in 1948. His parents were both Kibei Nisei, but they never insisted that he learn Japanese. He moved to East Los Angeles, CA at the age of seven. He graduated from Roosevelt High School, then started at the University of California at Berkeley. After a year, however, he returned to Southern California and attended California State College in Los Angeles.

Mr. Yokoyama never thought about going to Japan until he was 31 years old. At the time, the Vietnam War was still going on. He did not want to go into the U.S. Army, so he decided to study Buddhism in Japan. After he earned his master’s degree, he worked for an English Buddhist magazine called Eastern Buddhist for over 20 years until the magazine was absorbed into the University system. Since then, he has been conducting research and trying to publish his work. He married a Japanese woman and has one daughter and one son. He lives in Kyoto. (November 13, 2003)