<Begin Segment 11>

MA: So let's talk about, you mentioned earlier your, your younger sister who before the war, was sent to live with your stepfather in Sacramento.

NM: Well, you know, that part I don't understand. I get two stories. They, my brother heard the night before that they said the house was too small and we can't afford to keep her, is what my brother overheard. And, the other story is my uncle said, when the war broke out, he knew my stepfather was going into camp, so he decided to take my little sister to say goodbye to my stepfather. And when he got there, then, I guess he left to do something, and when he came back, my stepfather hid her, so he had to come back to Santa Monica. And I don't understand that, because, after the war, I mean when the war broke out, they were not allowed to travel. Just a twenty-mile radius of where they were. And so I don't know the whole story.

MA: So it seems then, uncertain circumstances surrounding. But your sister was young, wasn't she. A small child?

NM: Four or five. And then, they were sent to, I don't know what assembly center they went to, but they went to Jerome. And from Jerome, my stepfather denounced, repatriated. Wanted to repatriate to Japan.

MA: Renounced his citizenship.

NM: Yeah, so they were sent to Tule Lake. And I think before that they wanted to get my little sister out, but it was too late.

MA: You mean get her out of the camp.

NM: Out of camp. I don't think my stepfather would have. And, and then she forgot her father. She knew her mother, but she forgot her brother and sister. Or she wondered what happened to us and, and then when she was in camp, she was afraid of the guards and she thought they were gonna shoot her. And you think like that when you're little.

MA: I imagine it must have been very scary.

NM: Yeah, because when they were sent to Tule Lake, 'course, a lot of them had to go to other camps to make room for these, they're non the "no-no" boys, but the "no-no" boys were there too, besides the ones that denounced their citizenship. Anyway, what was I going to say now?

MA: You were talking about your younger sister, being in Tule Lake.

NM: Uh-huh. She doesn't remember anything about the camp except the guard and the rifle. And when they got to Tule Lake, oh, this is what I was going to say. They were separated from the older, like the grown-ups. They were in a separate area, like a little nursery.

MA: Oh, the children were separated.

NM: Uh-huh. And when they were shipped to Japan, which was just shortly after war, 1946, they were shipped from San Francisco, I guess, on the USS General H Gordon, and they were down below the deck, and the MIS were upstairs. And I think, I think my husband's brother was on there, and our best friend were MIS. And they were told that there's 150 Japanese prisoners of war down below, so please don't have anything to do with them. And mainly to exchange for prisoners over there. So when they got to Japan, my husband's older, my husband's cousin, who was sixteen, remembers docking at this one area near Tokyo, I guess it was. And it was cold, and I think my sister later on when we started writing said that she remembered sitting on a stone slab while her father went to scrounge for something to eat and so forth.

MA: And that was February of '46. I imagine life was pretty rough in Japan.

NM: Oh, it was for them. In fact, they weren't welcome there.

MA: You mean the people who had renounced their American citizenship and had been shipped over to Japan.

NM: Yeah, they call them gaijins. Yeah, we weren't Japanese, we were Americans. To them anyways.

MA: So your sister remembers sort of negative feelings.

NM: Yeah at that time, they called her gaijin and threw stuff at her. 'Cause she had to start Japanese school from the beginning and she was older and much bigger than the rest of them, and they teased her. But she came out all right. Got married and had a nice life.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.