The Marriage of Jimmy Doi's Parents
Leaving Japan
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"My parents, well, they were from Hiroshima, Japan, and they eloped. The day that my mother was supposed to get married to someone else, my [mother's] sister took my father to a woodshed and had all my mother’s Japanese clothes, you know. Instead of going into the house where she was supposed to get married, they went on the side and went to the shed, and they hid until that night and they eloped to Yokohama, Japan. Then they got on a ship that they thought was going to come to the United States, but they got on a slave ship that went to Mexico. They were there for a little while, and then they escaped and walked all the way from Veracruz, Mexico to El Paso, Texas. About a thousand miles or better. Then from there, they walked all the way to California."