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Densho Visual History Collection
Title: K. Morgan Yamanaka Interview
Narrator: K. Morgan Yamanaka
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary), Barbara Takei (secondary)
Location: San Francisco, California
Date: April 7, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-ymorgan-01-0028

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TI: Well, so I want to now go after camp. You're twenty, what, about twenty years, I mean, how old would you be, '46?

MY: I was twenty-two.

TI: Twenty-two years old, a significant chunk of your life has been spent doing nothing, just in camp, so what do you do next? Where do you go after this?

MY: Well, the question was, what can I do? I was really not prepared to do anything. I hadn't even really completed high school. So my brother and I were -- this is now March of 1946, six months after the war ended, and essentially nine other camps had completely closed and Tule Lake was at the beginning, well, it really was the tail end of the camp because I think it was end of March was actually closed, and I left on the thirteenth.

TI: Now, we should establish, so yeah, you were at the very end. Why did they hold you so long?

MY: I don't know any more reason than I was in the stockade or released from the stockade.

TI: 'Cause by then they had, your father had left, pretty much everyone else had left.

MY: Everybody else had left, nineteen thousand people. There were only a few of us that were left from the stockade, and another group of people who, they didn't know why they were being kept, so beyond us, we were told we could finally leave camp. This other group of people could not leave camp and were sent to Crystal City, not a WRA camp, as you know. It was another federal jurisdiction. And from there, if they were released, they were just told to go wherever they wanted to go, wherever they could go. Another group of people were not released and they were en masse sent to New Jersey...

TI: The Seabrook?

MY: Seabrook Farm, as essentially slave labor. So that's how finally the 120,000 people, ten concentration camps were closed, so I was one of the last of the hundred twenty thousand people to leave camp and go somewhere. The question of somewhere became a personal issue of where, so my brother and I decided, well, where can we go? Well, we have friends in Chicago, we have friends in New York, so we could go there and at least get the most out of the U.S. government by train fare. So that's what we did. We both took a train trip, train ticket to New York. I think if I was familiar with New England I would've asked for a northern New England state to cost the government a little bit more ticket money. [Laughs] Anyway, I took a ticket to New York. I stopped on the way to see a friend, Dave Ikeda, somebody else I knew by Ikeda name, and Dave said, "Morgan, why don't you stay with me? You don't know anybody in particular in New York." I said fine, so I stopped to stay with Dave in Chicago and he happened to be a short order cook in a restaurant at that point. And then I paid my rent money, about twenty-five bucks I had, and I don't remember how much I had total money, but twenty-five was the money a month given by the government. I stayed with Dave, and Dave essentially said, "Show up when I tell you because that'll be the day when the dishwasher gets paid, and he gets drunk, so he doesn't come to work and that's your job," which turned out to be exactly that. Well, that took care of my place to live and place to eat, and beyond that there was nothing to worry about in terms of living expenses. And then I met other friends, and in time Sue Koyasako said, "Morgan, why don't you work in this company that I work?" So I went from my short order -- I had upgraded myself from a dishwasher to a salad maker to even short order cook sometimes.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.