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AI: Excuse me, before we get too far into New York, the New York experience, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this time period where you were still at Cincinnati and you had moved into the dorm, with the other women there, and at this time, um, several things were happening at once. I think you had mentioned earlier that Tosh was in the army at this point.

MY: Yeah, but he was injured. I think that was, and he was -- I was putting that in my timeframe in my mind when Joe was talking, 1944 -- that's right, because I left Cincinnati in 1945. And then my mom, you know, we hadn't heard from Tosh and then we thought he was dead, you know, we didn't know. And then we heard that he was injured. And Joe was saying Mom got hysterical, but you know, she -- I think Tosh still has that picture, but he has a picture of himself in a robe. And I think that he had on these boots and he had his foot up like this, I think, with, he was on crutches because he had broken his -- he had a shrapnel in his leg. And the shoe, the boot looked like there was no, there were feet in it. I mean, it looked as though he had just put the boot there under the -- he was standing on one foot and the other boot kind of looked like it was loose, you know, and so my mother thought that he had lost a leg and then they just put the boot there under the robe to show, to make it look like he had a foot in there. So I think she got really very, very upset and then we found out he was just injured, but -- znd then he got a Purple Heart and I think that the newspaper got a hold of it -- I don't know because I know that I didn't contact the newspapers -- got a hold of this. I think that, I think that the army must notify, they must get notification from a general information center or ticker tape information or something. But, so I have a news article about my holding up Tosh's picture and it says something like, "Jap American Student" -- it says "Jap Student Brother Injured Overseas" or something. You know, something like that. Which I thought was kind of weird, but, but that article appeared in the paper. I wonder where it is. I think I do have it somewhere in my, in my album, I think. Or a copy of it, if I don't have the original news -- and I don't really know if I had written down the exact date.

But that was when -- then Tosh then, Tosh didn't come back from the army until I got to New York. So I was in Cincinnati in 1944 and 1945 and Joe said that he came out to Cincinnati in '44, right? In the fall. Oh, he went to Crystal City in '44? No. Somewhere around there he went to Crystal City and then they came out to Cincinnati to join me because I was in Cincinnati. In the meantime, I had, I had applied to go to university -- to New York University. And then my parents came out, and then I got the acceptance. So you know, they had decided on their own to come, when I told them there was a hostel in Cincinnati and of course there was nowhere else for them to go because Mike had just moved out to the, he was living, he was living at the monastery but he was fairly new because he had just moved out there, to Boston. And so the only place that they could move out to was where a family member lived, and they came to Cincinnati. But after they moved, as I said, I heard -- I got a letter of acceptance to univers-, New York University, and there was just no way I was going to change my plans just because my parents were there. And I just thought well, you know, we're not -- they had decided to, the only kind of job my father could get as sort of an ex-con, you know, a person who's released from prison, was to work as a housekeeper for a family. And so we, so they were there, and I was still in the dormitory. And so I remember telling them, "Well, you know, it's not as if I'm leaving you because we don't live together anyway," and it was very awkward for me to go and visit them, where they were working, so I, and so I didn't go to see them very often. Just rarely did I go to see them. So I said, "I think I'm going to go ahead and go to New York," and my dad said, "Yeah, go on, if that's what you want to do." And I didn't -- and one thing, after Mike was, you know, expelled from the university, it just felt -- I felt very unsafe, the whole city felt kind of unsafe to me, and I felt like I needed to leave.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.