<Begin Segment 11>

MA: So you left from Jerome, and I assume it was when Jerome closed. And how did you end up in Heart Mountain?

LN: Oh, because people were asked to select the other camps, unless you were going to go out. But we were all so young yet, so my dad thought, yeah, he'd better go to another camp.

MA: And then from Heart Mountain, you ended up going to Minnesota, St. Paul.

LN: Uh-huh. 'Cause by that time, we were much older. We were, like, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

MA: And what was that like for you, living in Minnesota?

LN: Well, not... there isn't, you don't have a Japanese community and all that, so it was pretty traumatic. But on the other hand, my dad opened up a restaurant. He says, "I notice there's a lot of..." oh, there was Fort Snelling, anyway, there were these two military camps, and there were a lot of Hawaiian, the soldiers were Hawaiians. So he said he's gonna start a restaurant and they can come and eat Japanese food. So it was a big hit because of that, for that reason. So it wasn't like we were wanting Asian friends, 'cause they were all Japanese. So it was nice, it was nice. But we weren't there for very long, maybe a year and a half or something. And the government said they would give us an allowance to get on a ship and go back. So that's what happened.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.