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JG: Tell me a little bit about your mother's family. Do you know anything about their history?

GF: My mother's mother, Chiye, is a Issei and she's from Japan. What city in Japan, I'm not sure. My great-grandfather came from Hiroshima and I believe my mother's mother... my sister knows. I believe she may have come from Yokohama. I may be totally wrong on that. And settled in the L.A. area. She was married and then got divorced at quite a early age, so when they got divorced, my grandfather, who I have never met, took my mother's sister and brother to Japan, and my mother stayed here with her mother. And my sister, my mother's siblings got stuck in Japan during the war, and I think it was quite brutal for my uncle. He was treated very poorly.

JG: As a Japanese American?

GF: As a Japanese American. So a lot of this timeline I'm not really clear on exactly when, but I do know that they both were stuck in Japan, my mother's siblings. Now, my mother herself lived here, and then my grandmother sent her to Japan prior to the war to attend high school, so she was at Toyo Eiwa in Tokyo until right before the war broke out, then she came back to Los Angeles.

JG: Where in Los Angeles were she and her mother living?

GF: I believe Boyle Heights.

JG: Oh, in Boyle Heights as well, okay. And what do you know of how your parents met?

GF: Parents met? They met down in the race tracks, Santa Anita racetracks after the evacuation.

JG: Okay.

GF: So after the order to evacuate the Japanese from the coast came down, they all, that was, I guess, a point where the government will determine which ones will go to which camp. And so they met there. And then my mother ended up going to... not Poston. The one in Utah.

JG: Topaz.

GF: Topaz. Thank you. Topaz, Utah. My father went to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.

JG: Oh, so they were separated?

GF: They were separated. They weren't married yet. They weren't married yet. They had just met.

JG: How did they continue their correspondence or their communication? How did they...

GF: Writing.

JG: Really?

GF: Yeah. And it's sad because my father's side, going to Heart Mountain, is really sad because my grandfather was actually, you may have seen in, in our website, is a World War I veteran and fought in France for General Pershing, but yet here he was a veteran, a U.S. citizen, and yet he was also put in a camp.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.