<Begin Segment 7>

LH: How about your mother. Did your mother say anything about that experience when he was taken away from the household?

FK: Not really, the only, the only thing I remember her mentioning was, the one time someone was interviewing her and she came up with the statement that she was glad that she went to camp.

LH: Why would that be?

FK: Well, that's what I said, "Mom, what would you say a thing like that for this awful situation?" And she said Dad had already been taken away and that she was at home with the four kids. And she was changing Chiseko's diapers in the bedroom and, I mean, Chiseko was Jane, Jane now so... she must, she would have had to be less than nine months at that time. And she said while I was changing her diapers, somebody yelled at her through the open window to pull her blinds because it was a black out. And our farm is like about 18 acres and we don't have that many neighbors that are real close to us. And she said, "It scared me half to death to know that someone was standing outside my bedroom window spying on us." She said without Yoshito, my father Frank there, it really scared her. So she said she felt a lot safer being with everybody else. And I thought, "What a thing to say, it just makes people feel (going to camp was for our benefit)." [Laughs]

LH: That's the first time I've every heard anybody express that opinion.

FK: Yeah. And she said, she said that... and it just, and it bothered me a little a bit because I thought people, if they didn't quite understand why she said that, would think that it was, we were put there for our protection. Which wasn't really the case at concentration camp at all, that we weren't put there for our own protection. But some people had that very feeling. In fact, I remember Jerry Nakata talking about his brother, (John who had) bought, who owned the grocery store, Eagle Harbor Market, on the Island. And that he said, he thought his brother was relieved because he would have had to deal with what the Caucasians on the Island would think, since most of the their customers were Caucasian. And when, when he (had to leave), I , I think they ended up leasing it to someone else. They leased the grocery store but the guy they leased it to was running it into the ground. And so, they ended up selling it because they couldn't do anything, because they weren't around to get it back on its feet. So, so I think at that time they did lose their grocery store. But it was the same situation of the unknown, of what was happening and (when they, if ever, would be back).

LH: So here's your mother, alone in the house with no husband, he's been taken away by the FBI.

FK: Right, right.

LH: And their four children...

FK: Yeah.

LH: In the household, that are all under age five or so.

FK: Age, yeah, age seven.

LH: Age seven.

FK: Right, yeah, so.

LH: Okay.

FK: Yeah. And she said it really scared her to know someone was standing out there, so.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.