Densho Digital Archive - Frank Kitamoto Interview (denshovh-kfrank-01-0024)

<Begin Segment 24>

LH: And, and why was it that your family chose to return to Bainbridge?

FK: Well, we were, we were fortunate that the Filipino men that, that were working for my mother and father, looked after the farm while we were gone. They actually had worked for my grandfather, before my parents bought the farm from them. And so, I think my mother and father made an arrangement with them that they would split the profits with them. That they would keep running the farm and they would split the profits. Both of them were bachelors. And at, in fact, they found out they could make more money by working in the shipyard rather than farming. So because of that, probably the farm probably wasn't kept up as much as it could be and the house was maybe pretty messy when we got back, but other than that it was in pretty good shape and all that stuff. So, that was one of the reasons. And I'm sure my mother had a real tug for that place, since it was the place from her childhood and her grandfather owned it and so forth. So I think, I think she even said my father wanted to sell it when we had to leave and she told him no, that she wanted to keep it. Because she said when this war was over we had to have a place to come back to. So I assume she prevailed and we, and they made this arrangement instead.

LH: So let me ask. Why was it that some Bainbridge Islanders returned and not the others?

FK: I think for various reasons. Of course, one was that you couldn't own land in those days unless you were a citizen. And, and land laws, alien land laws had been set up specifically, I think specifically for the Japanese since they were a certain threat, especially to the farming industry as far as becoming more proficient in farming and taking arid land and making it fertile and so forth. So, unless you were a citizen you couldn't own land. The only way you could own land, was if your kids were born in the United States and were old enough to legally have the farm in their names. And that was the case of my mother's, my mother's name. So because of that, some people had nothing to come back to because they were leasing land. So they lost that. There were a few people that actually sold their places when they left because there was, they couldn't figure out a way to keep track of it, or pay their taxes, or stay with it. There were a few people that actually had purchased land under someone else's name, who had the people sell the place without telling them. And they couldn't do anything about it since it, the property was actually under the other person's name, although they were the ones that were paying to purchase it.

LH: And so they lost everything.

FK: Yeah, so they lost, they lost everything. So I think it varied. But, and also there were cases where some of the families had their children move (to the) midwest or back east to go to school. And since the parents didn't have anything to come back to here, they actually went to where the kids were. And in a lot of ways, the concentration camp period was one of the reasons why we were disseminated across the United States and rather just on the West Coast.

LH: I see.

FK: Because I think a good, maybe a little over 90% of us were probably on the West Coast when the internment period started. So, I think most of the time if you go (to) some place like in Chicago, you'll find a lot of people that have their roots back to the Northwest.