<Begin Segment 17>

KN: How many families were at the --

HM: Oh, there were quite a few of us. I can't remember, but there were quite a few of us.

KN: And these were people who had been displaced?

HM: Yeah, we were in the same community, but they were well-established farmers, so they were given time to finish whatever they had to, were producing, so I don't know how long a period they had.

TI: And then for, like food and things, was it all communal so that everyone kind of ate together, chipped in food, ate together?

HM: Yeah, everybody chipped in. Right, Mom did the cooking. But it was very enjoyable. Nobody talked about anything sad or anything. Everybody was laughing like nothing had happened, which was very good. So we, we didn't know that certain people lived in the same area until the war broke. Maybe that was a good thing in disguise. We met good people. Yeah.

TI: Now, what did people think about the possibility of going back to their homes? What was the thinking?

HM: We, we tried and I got statement from the navy saying that they thought about it but we were too close to the military, so they didn't release us.

TI: Now, earlier I asked about the non-Japanese and you said there were two families.

HM: That I know of.

TI: The Zane and a Portuguese family, what happened to them? Were they able to stay or did they --

HM: They weren't evacuated... gee, I read about it just this morning, not when we were told to evacuate. But -- I didn't know this until I read a book, how they were compensated -- they were, like the Portuguese family were given three thousand dollars because it was worth that amount at that time, so three thousand dollars in 1941 was big money, so that's what they got, so they didn't get compensated like we did. But we had one family, the Chinese family, she wanted to get in for the repatriation, so she came and then we worked together, but she was denied flatly, but she, so I lost a very good friend because of that.

TI: Why is that, because...

HM: Because she couldn't get twenty thousand dollars like we did.

TI: But why would she, I mean, you tried.

HM: But she didn't tell us the story that they got compensated.

TI: Oh, I see. So the non-Japanese families got compensated, but the Japanese families didn't get compensated.

HM: No, we didn't.

TI: So what happened to the farm? I mean, so you didn't get compensated, what happened to it?

HM: Everything, they took everything away. So couple of days later, going back a little way, when my parents went back to the house to pick up the trunk and everything, lot of things were missing, already missing, but good thing whoever went in didn't mess around with the important, the trunk. We had other things. See, my mom used to buy us kimonos all the time, so we had beautiful kimonos in the trunk and nobody touched it. But since it was, the doorknobs were gone, the light fixtures were gone, and our water pump was gone, some, somebody had, I say stolen the thing, but the military said they didn't do it, but who did it? We don't know. So the house was stripped naked.

TI: But then in terms of the property, now that you couldn't go back there, what happened to the property?

HM: Went back to the navy.

TI: And, and you said you got no compensation?

HM: We got the twenty thousand dollars, but that was --

TI: That was later.

HM: -- later. But nothing. We lost everything. So we didn't live in the house very long.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.