<Begin Segment 24>

TI: During this time, when people were getting ready to leave and preparing, do you recall any acts of kindness from the Caucasians to help people out or anything like that?

MY: Well, not really so much that... I think we were grateful that the neighborhood didn't turn on us, you know. And, in fact, there was this little, I think she was about six or seven years old, and she would come down and visit, and she'd start noticing that we're packing and everything, and said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Oh, we're gonna, we got to go. We got to go to California." "What are you going to California for?" Of course, we just figured, what's the use of trying to explain to a little kid?" So, "Oh, just because they said we have to go." And she says, "Well, how come?" So I kept arguing with her, and then finally, I said, "Why don't you go with us?" And I knew right away I said the wrong thing. So she ran home, and then her mom and dad came down and said, "What did you tell..." what's her name now? Patty. And I said, "Well, she kept asking where we were going and why were we going, and why can't, why do we have to go, and so I told her to go with us." And he said, "Oh, boy," he said, "you sure started something. 'Cause she's all ready to pack and come down here to go with you." [Laughs] And so then when we had that first reunion, you know, Thomas reunion, here comes this girl, a Caucasian, she's quite big by now, and she had a couple of boys with her. And I said, she came and looked me up and said, "There you are." She said, "Here's that blue-eyed blonde that you were gonna take with you." And I said, "You've got to be kidding." [Laughs]

TI: Oh, so she remembered after all these years.

MY: Yeah.

TI: That she wanted to go with you.

MY: Yeah, she wanted to go with us. And I said, "But you can't go with us." "Why?" You know how kids are, a million questions to ask you. It maybe shielded... that's why I wanted this reunion to go. Because I figured that the thing that happened was that people that would come back to visit, or like we went back because Maki was in the service and the house was vacated, so we came back. But there's a lot of people that couldn't come back or wouldn't come back because of the laws that said the Isseis were, couldn't get citizenship. And there were only a handful of Niseis who were eligible to be a legal owner of property, you know.

TI: Right, so the alien land laws.

MY: Yeah, alien land laws.

TI: So this was a reunion after the war, so how many year reunion was it?

MY: Oh, I don't remember.

TI: But it was just to try to get the old community, prewar community back? But not just Japanese, but it sounded like the other neighbors showed up, too.

MY: Yeah. That's the thing that surprised the heck out of us, because, I don't know, it just seemed like half of 'em were hakujin, you know. And most of 'em didn't ask if they could come, they just came. And so I said, well, it makes you feel good to know that there's people out there that, you know, it kind of healed the community for us because then we knew that the majority of them, it wasn't their idea to get us out of there, but they were concerned about us. And so then when we had that reunion, then they came to acknowledge us. So we knew who our friends were. And I don't know if you know that Dan, Smith Brothers Dairy, he's the one that was a big educator, that his son was there. He came in and, he brought his family and came in, and he was visiting with everybody. So if the whole family was against that, they were for that...

TI: The removal and...

MY: Removal, they wouldn't have been there. But they came and they visited everybody and everything. And I thought, gosh almighty, that just really lets you know where the reputation of the Japanese Americans were, and how badly some of them felt. So some of us, we started working on it and we said, "Well, how many people we gonna figure on?" Said, "Well, how many can the church hold?"

TI: Do you remember what year that was, about, that you had the reunion?

MY: Gee, I don't know. It was ten... it's gotta be, I don't know, ten, twenty, fifteen years ago already.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.