<Begin Segment 19>

MN: Now when was your father reunited with your family?

JM: I think the last year they released him.

MN: That's 1945?

JM: Forty... I guess so. '44 or '45, I don't remember. I went out of camp, 'cause my sister and her husband (...) bought a car, so I just got into the car and went to Utah.

MN: What did you do in Utah?

JM: We worked at the Smith Cannery, canning tomatoes. They had one room reserved for the German POWs, and they were really happy, singing away. They're prisoners of war, but they're treated well, had good things to eat. No war for them. And (...) they were really (in a good mood).

MN: So what was the living conditions for you at this cannery?

JM: We had a separate room outside, bunch of us rented the room. Then one guy came over, says they needed us to go to Idaho to buck potatoes. So we all hopped on the car and drove to Idaho. And they said, they promised everything, they'll pay a dollar ten cents an hour. We were only making about sixty cents an hour. A dollar ten, that's good money. Plus they said they'll have Chinese dinner every night, catered Chinese. So when we went there, oh, everything was fine. Then bucking the potatoes got pretty hectic, 'cause they had to put it in a shed, underground shed, and usually they had a rope pulley that pulls the sack up and empties on the top. They didn't have the pulley, so we had to drag it up there and dump it, with all the dust, so finally said we want to pick the potatoes. Get somebody else to buck it. Then you had to have a bag on your stomach, drag it, put the potatoes in there. Gets pretty heavy, and we're not used to bending over, so next day we say okay, we'll go back to bucking the potatoes, but the owner was kind of, he makes decision just to get us all over there and change the rules, so finally we just quit.

MN: And then from there you went back to Manzanar?

JM: Went back to Salt Lake City, then went back to Manzanar.

MN: And then that's where you met your father again?

JM: Uh-huh. I was working for the community welfare before I went, and they gave me a real nice car, Oldsmobile, to drive all over camp and take the interviewers, talk to the Japanese people. And by that time war was over, so I had to go and tell the people to get ready to move out. They said, "Move out? Where we gonna go? We don't have any place, no home, no money." And they set up hostels, the different churches, so they finally agreed. In fact, Terminal Islanders, didn't have (any place to go), Terminal Island was closed. There's no home, so we ended up at the trailer camp. It was, it was all blacks in there, but they greeted us with open arms. Then one time there was a big controversy. Everybody was outside, so I asked 'em, what happened? "Oh, some black beat up this Japanese old man, so we're all looking for that person." They saw somebody looking through the windows, so they say, "Hey, there he is," so we all ran after him. But you know, black boys, kids are fast, got long legs. We couldn't catch him. But the group (in) ours were faster (...) so we caught him all the way at the end of the trailer camp. One guy had his leg and was twirling him around and hitting his head against the brick wall. Then they started interviewing him. "(...) What were you doing?" Then one of the guys in the group says, "Hey, that's my friend." He came to look for him, but he didn't know the address and all the trailers are all same, so he was looking through the window. Next day this black kid came over to me -- he was my friend, we used to box together -- said, "I'm the one that beat him up. I didn't really beat him hard. I was drunk." So I took him over to the man, made him apologize, then everything was cleared up. He said when he gets drunk he doesn't know what he's doing.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.