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PW: And going back to your mother, quickly, where is she when your father is in Tokyo, or Yokohama?

KY: She left camp around the time that my father had gone. And she and a girlfriend went, they had found jobs in Baltimore to be, she thought, stagehands. And when they got there, it looked like they weren't going to be stagehands, that they were going to be on stage. And that freaked her out. I got the impression that it was more like a burlesque or strip club kind of thing, but I can't find any proof of that. But anyway, they got right on a train and they went to Cleveland where her friends had friends. And so for a few months, she worked in a factory making bombs or something, I forget what, there was something written down. So she did that for three months or so, and then by that time, it's like summer, right, it's summer and they're getting ready to leave, the family is getting ready to leave Topaz. So she went to Detroit where her younger sister and her husband were, and spent a couple weeks there. And then she went back to Topaz to, I guess, help get things ready. But I somehow have the feeling that she might have returned to the Bay Area before Auntie Ne-san and Alameda Grandma, I'm not sure. Because it sounded like, for a while, she stayed with the Yatabes in Berkeley, and then when Grandma and Auntie Ne-san had a place, they went back to Alameda, she joined them in Alameda. The addresses changed a lot in that time.

PW: Did your mom talk about Topaz and that whole process of moving?

KY: She would say that she had a great time. She would always say she had a great time. She talked about, she learned to knit, I think, in Tanforan. And so she really loved that, and she made a sweater, and so she was knitting in Topaz and also I think doing embroidery. She worked in the hospital. She worked in the hospital. I didn't hear about a social life there. All I know is that a lot of her friends lived in a different part of the camp, so she didn't get to see all her good friends, because the Takedas were there and all these Alameda friends were there, but they weren't close to where she was. I don't know if she... it seems like she didn't regularly go to church. Now, the Buddhist church was really important to her. She was YBA conventions, basketball, she was really active in the church. And I gather that she wasn't as active it was during camp. I thought I heard her say that it was because it was so far away. But if I look at the map where she is and where the Buddhist temple was, it wasn't that far away. So I'm not sure what it was, I'm not sure.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.