<Begin Segment 16>

MA: How did your father feel about the end of the war, especially the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

YA: Well, he, he could read English little bit, so he accepted it. And he realized that it was such a fearful bomb, that it was an unbelievable bomb, first time. He accepted the defeat, I guess. When we didn't have to go to Japan, it was good.

MA: And that's when your father kind of made the decision to move the family to California.

YA: Uh-huh. My mother, at that time, had operation. I can't remember if it was after the war was over, but she was still recovering. And the doctor told her, my father, she shouldn't, we shouldn't go back to Seattle in February, it's too cold, so to go to a warmer climate. And my father, during the war, he met a man that lived in Los Angeles that came from the very same village, the same village, in Wakayama. And when that happened, it's like your blood brother. And my father's brother was happened to be the sonchou at that time -- sonchou is the village chief -- when Mr. Uyeda was still in... growing up, leaving, ready to leave Japan, to immigrate. And he recognized my father's last name. It's a very unusual name, Kanogawa. And, you know, they're like brothers. And he's, and my father was writing to him, and he told him our situation and he says, "Oh, come to Los Angeles. You could stay at my house." He had a big two story house, half empty because he was an empty nester. So he welcomed the four of us.

MA: Oh, so that's how you ended up in, in L.A.

YA: Los Angeles.

MA: And what neighborhood of Los Angeles?

YA: In Boyle Heights. We stayed in... well, I stayed there for two weeks and I found a housegirl, they called it, where you live in with a family and you keep house, help clean house, for three months before my parents found a house to rent.

MA: Were there a lot of Nisei girls around your age who did that?

YA: We all did that. We all did that, house girl.

MA: Was Boyle Heights at that point a sort of resettlement area for people coming out of camps?

YA: Uh-huh. Some Japanese still owned their homes. They had it in the names of their children. So a... there were a lot of Japanese families still in Boyle Heights after the war. There were a lot of Jewish families. It's predominately Latino now, but there are still a sprinkling of Japanese families.

MA: How did you feel about the community in Los Angeles, the Japanese American community in comparison with Seattle? Did you notice any differences in the attitudes of people there?

YA: Well, no. I think this camp experience, as soon as I met another Nisei, "What camp were you in?" That's how we got our conversation started. You know, invariably, we would know some person that was in that camp or, or were related to somebody. It's amazing what that camp experience... it was terrible, yet in some respects, made our world so small. Everybody knows everybody.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.