<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So let's go back to, you said the most difficult thing was your four pets.

SY: Now what? Four pets, yes.

TI: Talk about that.

SY: I had a dog, and the dog was a great companion, it would go to the park with me and so forth. It was probably a mixture of German shepherd and something else. I had a canary. The canary my mother adored because this canary would ring a bell whenever we sat down to eat. And so we would give... it loved rice, so we called this canary, yellow canary, a Japanese canary because, you know, how many birds would eat rice, we don't know. Then, at the World's Fair, you could buy these little turtles with beautiful colors, decorated pictures, and at that time it was legal to sell, they had thousands of them. But now, because of the bacteria and so forth, they don't allow you to buy those things. And the, let's see, the bird... there was one other animal I had -- oh, goldfish, a real cheap, inexpensive goldfish, I probably wouldn't have ever missed that one, but it was still a pet. And so how do you get rid of it? My friend, a Caucasian fellow by the name of Russell accepted it. And the irony of this is when I, when a little town, I can't even remember the town, in Wyoming, they had a article in the Wyoming newspaper and, it was near Laramie, and the students -- teacher asked, "Could we send you a questionnaire?" I said, "Sure, please do." And one of the questions that I answered, it says, "After the war, World War II, were you able to see your pets again?" And I had to write back, I did go and try to locate my friend Russell, he was gone and I never did see the animal. But even after all those years, the kids were still interested whether I was able to see, and I'm talking about kids, not adults, I'm talking about what the kids felt.

TI: Yeah, kids, I mean, pets are so, so important.

SY: Right.

TI: So Russell took the pets.

SY: Yeah, he took the pets, and I never saw him after that.

TI: Then, what happened next? This must be getting close to the time that you had to leave?

SY: The other thing that -- Russell and I decided to go hiking one day, and we went and we saw this nice, tall hill. We climbed up to the summit, and all of a sudden I looked out over, and I saw ships in San Francisco Bay, and I immediately ducked down. And Russell said, "What's the matter?" I said, "I am Japanese. I'm not supposed to see the San Francisco Bay." And he laughed, and he says, "Who is going to know? And who really cares?" So I took a look at it, and when I went home and I told my parents, I says, "You know, United States is going to win the war." I said, "I have never seen so many ships in that San Francisco Bay," big ship, little ship, you name it, different types of ships, and I was so impressed with that, that the U.S. was definitely going to win, even before, just right after the war. And so it would be nice to see Russell again, just to talk about that incident.

TI: Yeah, see if he remembers.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.