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MN: When did you folks leave Manzanar?

JM: I believe in about October. October of '45.

MN: And then after you left Manzanar, where did you go?

JM: We came back to Little Tokyo for a little while, for about a day or two, and then we had to, 'cause there just simply was no housing available. We couldn't afford it anyway, because, heck, all they gave us was, what, fifty bucks and a ticket out of, out of Dodge, so to speak. So we wound up in these trailer courts in Long Beach, the Los Cerritos trailer camp. And there wasn't one or two -- I'm not talking about a few trailers, there were like hundreds and hundreds of 'em. And a lot of people lived in there, blacks, whites, everything. And these were like dingy little... oh, my gosh. I would say they're barely fit for human habitation. Even FEMA wouldn't want 'em. They were... but a lot of Japanese Americans wound up in these trailer camps, not just in Long Beach but in Roger Young Village in Griffith Park, they were in Quonset huts over there, and then Sun Valley, they had a whole bunch of trailers over there. I think Tak was living in that.

MN: Nakayama.

JM: Nakayama.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.