<Begin Segment 29>

TI: Well, talk about how it felt to leave the reception area as a free family now. You're now...

HN: It was, we still, we were still were carrying the baggage, still had the nagging feeling of, you know, still under the internment. Until we got on the train and it was about four hours, late, slow train, to Shizuoka, and we got that, got to our grandparents' home about, at night, maybe about eight o'clock. And that night, when every, a lot of relatives came over to see us, and everything calmed down, was ready to go to sleep, I felt something different, you know. "Wait a minute, something, am I missing something?" And I looked around and opened the window. There was no barbed wire, no tower, and it's been about four years to ever live in a place where there weren't any confinement. And my cousin was there, and I yelled out, "Freedom!" [Laughs] My cousin was surprised and so forth. That's, that's how I felt. That's the first time I feel, how you feel to be free.

TI: So you actually yelled "freedom"?

HN: Yes, yes. I don't think... you would never feel that because you have never been in confinement like that, but a lot of people who were, maybe they feel as I did. No fence, no guard.

TI: That's good. Thank you for sharing that.

HN: And I was wondering, why in Japan? Why in Japan? This is Tojo country. I feel so free. I'm so happy that I'm here, and how come I didn't feel this way, feel this way in the U.S.? How come I didn't feel so free? That's the feeling I had that night. I never forgot that.

TI: Now, your brother had preceded you, so was your brother also at the house?

HN: Yeah, he met us at the reception center.

TI: And when you saw your brother, how was he doing? How was...

HN: Oh, he was, he was eager to see us. You know, join the family.

TI: And now that you're free and you can move about and, and maybe even your mind is probably freer, what did you see? I mean, what was, what were the conditions in Japan?

HN: Oh, it was terrible conditions. The thing is -- I have to qualify that -- is the place we, Shizuoka, the town my grandparents were living in, was never affected by the war. It was a small town. They were never bombed. They still maintained their farmland, their food. They didn't have any extreme situation for food shortage or anything like that. So when we first got there and the first... we stayed, I stayed there at grandparents' for maybe a month and a half, so I didn't feel the suffering of the people living in the city. And I saw, I felt the suffering after I moved out of the grandparents' home and went to Tokyo.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.