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PW: And what about Topaz? Did your father talk about Topaz?

KY: Well, yeah. My father was in the, sort of the advance team that went to Topaz to kind of finish up the building. So he left a little earlier. My mother got mumps. Mumps, I think. So she was delayed, she had to wait. I don't know if they put her in the hospital, but she waited and she went by herself.

PW: Do you think she got mumps in Tanforan?

KY: Yeah, must have been.

PW: And your dad, you're saying early...

KY: Because he went early.

PW: Topaz opened September 1st.

KY: September. He must have gone, like, in August or something.

PW: So your mother was isolated, had to recover, and then she joined the family.

KY: Yeah.

PW: And who -- let's start with your father's side -- so who of that family, of the Yatabes, went to Topaz?

KY: Of that family?

PW: Yeah.

KY: Uncle Tak, his wife, and their son, who was around five at the time, Jon, and then my father and his parents. And then because the oldest sister here, Auntie Chiyo, married a medical student who was from Hilo, and she went back with him and then had her family there when she was being the nurse running the hospital, running the house. When she was pregnant with the second child, she asked her younger sister, my Auntie Toshi, to join her and help her. So Auntie Toshi then went to Hilo, met somebody, had her families there. So I had those two aunts in Hilo, and they each had two kids there. So the only family ones left here were Uncle Tak and my father. Uncle Tom had a dental practice in Fresno, so he went, he was interned in Jerome, it was he and his wife and their eleven-year-old son.

PW: And then same thing for your mother's side of the family. Who went?

KY: They all went to, my mother and her two sisters and grandma went to Topaz.

PW: So your parents met in Topaz?

KY: Technically Ogden, but in those years, yeah. It was in '44. They were both in Ogden working during the summer at a Del Monte cannery. I thought my father was topping sugar beets, but maybe that was another summer. But somehow my mother's girlfriend wanted to go out with this particular guy, and her parents said you can't do that unless it's a double date, unless you're going with somebody else. So they found, Mom had agreed, and they found somebody. And then at the last minute, this other guy couldn't make it, and my mother was, found out that my father was the substitute and she was really looking forward to it, because she had been eyeing him for a while. Her family was on Block 4 and his family was on 11. I think that's right, or was it the other way around? And somehow she had occasion to walk by, and she would see him. And she would say this, she told me this story several times, but he would be wearing some kind of homburg hat and one of those red and black lumber jackets, and he would be whittling in front of his barrack. Of course, he never, I don't think he ever noticed. He would say that they met on a blind date in Ogden and that it was love at first sight. So I guess he, I don't think he ever saw her. [Laughs] I mean, he was whittling, you know. So they went on this blind date, and after that, that was it. So that would have been the summer of '44, and then he was drafted in the spring of '45.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.