Densho Digital Archive - Tokio Hirotaka - Toshio Ito - Joe Matsuzawa Interview (denshovh-htokio

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AI: What condition did you find your homes and your property? If you could tell me a little bit about that.

TI: When I came back, it was later than when the first few families started coming back, because I was still in the military and that was 1946, summer of '46 when I got back.

AI: But had you heard from your brother?

TI: Yeah, I used to write letters to him, back and forth. Things were not exactly the way they left it, of course, but evidently things were not so bad that he couldn't get the place back in shape and start farming again shortly after they got back. Because they had, unless they got things going why, they wouldn't have any sources of income. And as it was, he probably had to go down to the bank in Kirkland, Shinstrom's, where we used to bank prior to the war, and get a loan to get the money to buy fertilizer and seeds, and keep him going until crop time. And that's how it usually used to work, lot of the farmers used to go year to year, or crop time to crop time, to borrow the money in the fall and then go until crop time, and then pay 'em back, and then continue the cycle. And it was just getting to the point where lot of the farmers were starting to not have to do that, they would have some money in reserve, where they wouldn't have to go borrow money every winter. So I don't, but I don't really know how the others fared, as far as how the...

AI: And your family home?

TI: The home --

AI: Was that when it was rented out?

TI: Yes, the Clark Jenkins family, Mr. Jenkins was a plumber, and he had volunteered to look after the house, and he said that he was able to find a renter. Well, he said, that if he could get permission to put in a bathtub, and a bathroom, then, he said, he was sure that he could rent the house out. So we told him, yeah, certainly, we were happy. We said, "Go ahead and do whatever you have to do." And so he rented it out to some people. And at that time, evidently housing was pretty tight because, you know, our house was not much more than a shack. I mean, it had a pretty good size to it, but then it was one of those homes that were put up by families of Japanese, gathering and having a roof raising, or house raising, or something. I mean, instead of building a barn, they were building a house. [Laughs] That's about the way when I, and like I say, when I came back, things were pretty much back, crops were in and it was harvest time, so I just pitched in, and started in where we left off. And as far as the sentiment around the neighborhood, and the town of Bellevue, I couldn't really judge it. I kinda think that we were accepted fairly decently, by most of the townspeople. With of course the few handful of people that are, and were, against the Japanese evidently all along. Only they didn't surface until we were gone, or else, they got caught up in the hysteria of the war, stories, horror stories that were prevalent in those days, prior to and during the war.