<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Well, in the months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was a short period of time when the government allowed sort of a voluntary sort of relocation program for people sort of west of the Cascades.

FS: Yes.

TI: And I know some families came to Spokane. Do you recall that, do you recall that period when people were coming to Spokane?

FS: Oh, certainly. I recall that, that... for instance, at the Methodist Mission, there were new faces, and at that point, well, Bill Nishimura's family moved up into the north end of town, and I met him, he was taking classes at John Rogers. I think he'd already graduated or was about to graduate from the school he was in, but I met them and I met other Japanese families who had voluntarily relocated to Spokane. You would see new faces in downtown, for example, particularly, I really noticed that after, after I started college, and I had some, a little more mobility, and they were, and I would pal around with Bill, and we would go downtown and there were some Japanese businesses that we would visit, the drugstore and the restaurants and stuff.

TI: And so, and so during that period, so it's a little bit later, but, but my understanding is that the Japanese American community got quite a bit larger from this influx of new people to Spokane.

FS: Oh, certainly, yes.

TI: How did that change the community? What was, what was different about it?

FS: Well, you know, the old community was pretty cohesive, there were so few of us. And of course there were these, the volunteer evacuees were, were not, at that point, part of the community. They were just, they moved in and... of course there was, I suspect there was more work, and I don't know about this, but they, they just mixed in and we would see them, I would see them more often. My Caucasian friends, most of them got drafted. I, after graduation, boy, I didn't see hardly any of those guys, 'cause they were gone. We were the age when, just, eighteen, and it was an "I gotcha." So they were gone, and so I, I started to pal around with Bill Nishimura and some of his friends. And so at that point, I had a lot more Japanese American acquaintances.

TI: And, and how did that feel for you?

FS: Well, I didn't know all of them, I got acquainted, and we would, at this point, pal around, I guess, "hang out" is, probably the expression now is "hang out." And there was a fellow who had a drugstore and a soda fountain downtown at the edge of where the old Japanese community was, and we'd go hang out there. We'd go out together and stuff.

TI: Now, how did the, the Japanese Americans who came sort of in this "voluntary evacuation" period, how did they compare with or how were they compared to the downtown Japanese Americans that when you grew up with, you sort of had frictions with? Were there similarities, differences, or how would you describe that?

FS: Well, first of all, I think the people who moved in were, were, oh, well, they tended to maintain a low profile. And of course we, there were not as many functions at the church, for example. You didn't gather in big groups anywhere, because that was suspect, I suspect, and so on. Yeah, they were mostly low-profile kind of thing. The recollections are not very strong about this, I don't remember a hell of a lot about it.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.