2. Meet Kei

My great-grandfather Kei Koyama, born on March 3, 1898, arrived in Tacoma, Washington, on December 31, 1915, aboard a ship named the Aki Maru (秋丸). Originally from a village near Kitakanbara (北蒲原), the area has since been swallowed up by the modern city of Niigata (新潟市).

Kei dreamed of becoming a doctor, and by the time he arrived in America, it seems he had made up his mind to become a dentist. He left behind an older brother named Kiichi (喜一), a younger brother Tsuyoshi (剛), and his mother and father (names not known) to seek the educational opportunities necessary to become a dentist that were unavailable to him in Japan at that time. He may have also left sisters.

Initially, Kei Koyama learned English at the Methodist-run Seattle Pacific College (today Seattle Pacific University) before moving to Portland in either 1927 or 1928 to enroll in the dentistry program at North Pacific College (today OHSU). While at Seattle Pacific College, he met Teru Koyama, with whom he fell deeply in love. They married in 1927 before moving to Portland. Graduation records held by OHSU indicate he completed his dentistry degree in 1929 at the start of the Great Depression.

By the time of World War II, Kei Koyama had a firmly established dental practice in Nihon Machi (today Portland’s Chinatown or Old Town), serving the small but growing community of Japanese immigrants and their children. Kei Koyama was a fiercely loyal and dedicated family man, adored particularly by his youngest daughter Miriam “Kiyo” Koyama, born in 1933. His oldest child, William Koyama (my grandfather), often cites him as a role model in shaping his decisions to join the Boy Scouts, seek reprieve from internment by enrolling at a boarding school, and eventually join the Army post-war in 1946. Kei Koyama was less religious than his wife, but he quickly adopted the American values that drove him to work long, hard hours in the dental office, sometimes to Teru’s chagrin.