<Begin Segment 18>

TI: So where did you go after Heart, where'd the family go after Heart Mountain?

BS: Well, the war ended in 1945 and so the camp was closing, and so my father found a farm in Idaho to pick potatoes, so I remember that bus ride that we took to Idaho.

TI: So who, who was now still with the family at this point? So end of the war, it was your father, mother, you and who else?

BS: My oldest brother was in the army. He was in Europe. My second brother graduated high school and he was working in Cleveland, Ohio, and so in the camp were my parents and my two sisters, the five of us, and so in 1945 in the summer, we boarded this bus for Idaho. And I remember it was sort of strange and sort of scary to go outside. I was almost sixteen. And so we got to Idaho, and we, we were put into this house, very small house. It had a coal burning cooking stove. That was the only source of heat. It had running water. The water, I guess it's called the cistern, underneath the house was this concrete, concrete something holding water. The water was coming from the ditch, irrigation ditch next to the house. That water was coming from the river, and so that water from the ditch was going into the cistern. And so it was this small house that we lived in and one day the irrigation ditch was shut off for something, and I remember there were puddles of water and I went down into the ditch and I caught several trout. But that's the way it was in rural Idaho.

TI: And how did it feel for you to be out? You said at first it seemed a little scary and different, but now that you weren't at Heart Mountain, what did it feel, just being out?

BS: Well, it wasn't too bad in Idaho because when I went to school, I saw a couple of my friends from the camp, but there were some Japanese at the school because there were a lot of Japanese farmers in that area, so it wasn't too bad in Idaho. But later on after the potato harvest was done and there were no more work, so we decided to go back to California. And so we got on this train and, oh, it was full of these returning servicemen in uniform, and so that was a scary situation to me. We, five of us, man, we just sat in our -- no, there was four of us. My father went ahead. We just sat in our chair in that train, didn't hardly speak. Now I remember that when we left the camp, I don't know who it was that told us not to speak Japanese in public, and so we were always aware of that, so going back to California in that train was a little scary. So anyway, we got to --

TI: When you say scary, was, did anything ever happen? Did anyone say anything to you or make any comments?

BS: No. No one said anything to us, but just seeing those soldiers in uniform made it a tense situation, and so luckily there was no incident and so everything went okay.

TI: And you felt this way even though you had a brother who was serving in the military? He was in the army, but you still felt this, this tension, this stress?

BS: Right. Well, I mean, we didn't think about that.

TI: Think about what?

BS: A brother being in the army.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.