<Begin Segment 46>

TI: So I want to go back, so we're now in the sort of, in the '50s, and about this time is when you got married.

FS: Yeah, well, I, it's a bad, it's not a good story, but we were engaged back in 1949 or 1950, and I couldn't get work. You know, it was just impossible. I was working in the laundry and trying to find work and finally I decided, well, boy, I can't get married if I can't find work. So I asked Lily to let me off the hook and we did. Finally, it was not until 1954, '53, '54, I finally got work at this Hollister-Stier Laboratories, and started earning money, and gained enough confidence to think that I was going to make it. And so I, we did, it was a tough choice for her. She had other choices.

TI: But she waited for you?

FS: Well, I don't know whether she waited for me or whether... I hope that's what it was, but we finally did get married in 1955.

TI: And about this time, your, your father's health wasn't that good.

FS: Yeah, my father's health failed. He had cancer, and he was failing very rapidly. And I think I told you the story about my brother.

TI: Well, yeah, I wanted to talk about it. So it was during this time, and we had talked about, earlier, about your oldest brother, George, who you would describe as very bright, very smart, and earlier we had established that he was in Japan when the war started. So why don't you describe briefly what happened to him when he was in Japan.

FS: Well, this is a story that I get secondhand from my sister, but he... my father, of course, my brother was the oldest son, and so with I guess the expectations from my father, he was sent back to Japan to go to school. And of course, he was like me, I don't think he knew, he knew a lick about Japanese, but they did, he went to, he went to a school that teaches foreign Japanese, Japanese to people, to speak, learn Japanese. And so he went there, and after two years, he was, he was admitted to a Japanese college to study, and that was about 1940, I guess. As I say, he's a really bright guy and doing well in college, and then the war broke out. And of course, at that point, we lost all contact with him. There was no way that we could hear anything, my sister wrote to the, wrote to the International Red Cross to see if they could find something about him, but we, we didn't hear a thing from then on until after the war was over. And it turned out that, that as he was an American citizen, the Japanese military couldn't touch him. But he, he, and he insisted he was, and he refused to, to go in the army. Until finally at some point, they took away his ration cards. I know he went out to the country to, to either my father or mother's home and tried to live there, but when they took away his ration cards, they were trying to starve him out. And so he finally went into the military, and the chronology I'm not sure of, but he apparently got ill somewhere in there and spent most of the time hospitalized or in some kind of medical care. And from what I can understand, never served actively in the Japanese army. It was shortly after the war, I think -- and I'm... somehow my mother or my father got word through somebody that he was alive in Japan, and then my youngest brother, Floyd, went to Japan and they got together. And my brother George then worked, I understand, as an interpreter for the, the U.S. military in Japan.

TI: Now at that point, when he worked for the, the U.S. military, was he working as a, as a U.S. citizen, or what happened to his citizenship?

FS: No, no, he was a Japanese, still a Japanese citizen. He has lost his --

TI: Because when he went into the...

FS: Military, Japanese military.

TI: ...military, he had to, to renounce his U.S. citizenship.

FS: Yes, yes, absolutely. So, so he, he was stuck there, and he married this, this lovely Japanese girl, and he had, of course, had decided to settle, obviously, settle there and live, and live in Japan as a Japanese citizen. When my father was, was finally, he was dying of cancer, and we, and my sister was active in the JACL and knew, knew the ropes, anyway, she said, she told him, "Dad, Dad wants to see you before he dies, so come home." And we somehow got a visa for him to come home, this was 1956 or '57. But he, so we, but my sister said, "If you come, bring your family. Bring your wife and daughter with you," and so he did that. And once we, once we got him into the States, the, my sister initiated through some attorneys here in town, he sued the, she filed a suit for him to sue the government for his, to get his citizenship back, claiming he was coerced into the Japanese military.

TI: Now, was this something that George wanted?

FS: I, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But it was...

TI: Because you had mentioned earlier how he --

FS: But he, but he obviously agreed with this thing, or he would have, would have said something, but he, I think maybe he did want to come home. But yeah, he, and so the suit was filed, and we were ready to go to federal court to do this thing. And I guess the expression is at the courthouse steps, thereabouts, we got a letter from the Secretary of State saying that, that his citizenship has been granted, been reinstated. So he was now, again, an American citizen.

TI: So, so your father in some ways was able to see the whole family back together before he died.

FS: Yes, yes. That was a, in a way, that was a good story. Because he, he was, he was, at that point, terminally ill and bedridden.

<End Segment 46> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.