<Begin Segment 43>

TI: How did you, how did you feel as you were doing this? What did you, what kind of --

TA: Feel like a stranger. [Laughs] You know, in a strange world. I mean, we thought that we were returning to Japan as Japanese, but we're not. And we try to speak to 'em, they don't understand us, when we asked for directions. And then we, they're speaking that Saga-ben. Saga dialect, and we'd catch bits of words, but we really don't know what they were saying. So we struggled, and they pointed their finger and we showed 'em the address that they gave us, and finally we got, got there. My uncle initially welcomed us, but then that lasted about, maybe two days. Because gee, you got a family of eight to feed, and his house was a small house, and he gave up his small yo jo han, which is oh, a little place, about this much with all of us sleeping --

TI: You mean like about 10' x 10' kind of?

TA: Oh, 10' x 10' would have been a luxury. Let's see. A tatami is 4' x 6'?

CO: Something like that, yeah.

TA: And it's a yo jo han, so 4 1/2 tatami, so maybe about, about maybe 8' x 8'? It's a small room, and we all, of course, in Japan you don't have beds and everything else. You just throw your blankets there, and we didn't have any blankets. They didn't have any. You know, they don't have blankets for all of us, but what spare they had, they gave us and we spread it out, we all huddled under one -- usually a cushion and a blanket and cushion and blanket and you have separation, but we just spread it, we didn't have any blankets against the floor, we just have it all up on top of us. And it was cold. They don't have heaters, they don't have heaters at all, and we weren't used that, but it was really cold. Because this is, this is January. And he, he fed us one time, rice, but then thereafter, he said, "Fend for yourself." You know, he had his own family to take care of, and we imposed upon him. But he was good enough to give us this place. So as a result, we had to sell our clothes, whatever, on the black market, and get enough money to feed ourselves. And at the same time, we were considered Americans, so we were not, we couldn't get what they call haikyuu, which is rations. And they had rice rations, very little, with wheat and little bit of, a little noodles and hard crackers that the army had, surplus, and they came with this. And that was haikyuu, but we weren't, we weren't authorized. My father was the only one that could go, because he, his name was on the koseki tohon, the family register, as a Japanese. So he got it. My mother couldn't, and the, the kids couldn't. So as a result, unbeknownst to us, but I later found out he registered us on the family register. That's the reason why we were able to get some haikyuu. And so we got some haikyuu, but other than that, we, we had to fend for ourselves.

<End Segment 43> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.