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VY: Let's back up a little bit. I want to talk about your mom and dad. So now they have met, so your dad came from Japan when he was sixteen, he went to Southern California, started to work in the produce industry, was part of a baseball league, a baseball league?

JT: Yes.

VY: Okay, came to the Alameda area?

JT: Yes, to play a game and that's where they, I guess, saw each other.

VY: Okay, so that's how they met? And when they got married, how long had they been married when the war broke out or when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, around that time?

JT: Let's see. That was December of '41? They were married in... oh, January 19th of 1940. So they were married that year, the year before. They were probably married less than a year when the, on December 7th or about a year.

VY: So they'd been married less than a year at that time, and had they had any children yet?

JT: No.

VY: So then what happened to them?

JT: Well, then they got the notice, and, of course, the other thing about my mom and dad, and I really have to give a lot of credit to Daddy, was that Nana and Papa, my mom's parents, lived with them the whole time. From the time they got married 'til the time they passed, Mom and Dad never lived together just the two of them. They had Nana and Papa, then they went to camp and had Judy, me and Kent, and Nana and Papa, we all kind of, like a herd, we moved around. And so Daddy... I shouldn't say, "I think," I know my mother was pregnant when they were sent to Tanforan. She didn't talk about it, I figured it out. [Laughs] You know what I mean.

VY: You did the math.

JT: Yeah, I did the math.

VY: That sounds so difficult to be subjected to those conditions while you're expecting a baby.

JT: Right, and had elderly parents, too, to worry about. And my dad, I talk about sadness and anger and bitterness, but Daddy, one thing I remembered him saying multiple times that he would go, "Yep." He didn't say much, but he'd go, "Yep." We had to sell everything for a hundred and twenty dollars, including a piano that he had bought for Mom. And that stuck with him, you know, he talked about that piano a lot. Well, he didn't talk about it, but interestingly, Mom had this gift of playing the piano. She could say, "What do you want to hear?" and you say anything, and she'd play it by ear. It was kind of, such a gift, and it skipped a couple, it skipped two generations. One generation, because one of our nieces has that gift, too.

VY: So it's still in the family?

JT: It's still in the family, yeah.

VY: So did your parents talk about anything else about right when they had to get ready to go to camp and get rid of their belongings? Did they own property, did they own a house or anything at the time?

JT: No. In fact, they weren't allowed to, because Daddy was an alien, he wasn't allowed to buy property. And I was just looking up where they lived at the time of the evacuation, and it was on Park Street, which is still the main drag in Alameda, and they lived upstairs from what was then a beauty shop, or a barber shop. And that building, unfortunately, boasts three buildings which were part of Japantown, burned down recently, and it's still an empty lot. And that's another sadness that I carry. I have this, I don't know what I call it, and I wish I didn't, but I carry, I feel pain, other people's pain. And I carry it, and I try to release it, but it's so, makes me very sad, and I contemplate a lot about that. I wish I had a magic wand, make all that, to change all that, but I know it's not, it's hard to do, impossible. But I think a lot of us my age, we carry that pain or sadness. But we have to channel it in positive ways, I think, and I do that by trying to, like my mom and dad both, they helped people, they helped a lot of people. And so they were great role models for all of us to be more, I call it generous with our time, and different kind of gifts that we all, each of us had as her kids. We'll all deny it, of course, that we did what they wanted us to do because they didn't tell us, we just had wonderful role models, I would say. To a fault, because my mother, I know I'm going, jumping around, but my mother was very kind and generous in, gave everything away, including her time and her gift of wanting to help people. She helped so many people, and Daddy would shake his head, he goes, "Where's Mom?" "I don't know, she's out helping someone." And it kind of made me mad because I was outspoken. And I go, yeah, she should spend more time here with us. But we had Nana, or her mother, who lived with us 'til she was ninety-four, I think. She died in 1967, and she did a lot of the cooking and ironing.

VY: Oh, so that's interesting.

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