<Begin Segment 21>

TI: So big operation, big business, your father is taken away from the FBI, so what happens to all these businesses? Who takes care of this now?

MT: When he was taken, and then about (one day) later my father's partner was taken, because of his association with my father, 'cause he was not involved with any of those things. So what happened is that my mother had to take over, and my mother, of course, didn't have the background for it, so she had a very difficult time. And we were living in San Pedro and she couldn't drive, so the people at the market, the person that was the young manager, he would buy food for us and different things and whatever we needed 'cause she couldn't, she couldn't go. She didn't have a car. We had a car, but she couldn't drive. And so then after my father's partner got taken his, his Nisei wife was talking to my mother and she and my mother was, I guess she must've been talking about how difficult things were and said, "Well, why don't you live with us? 'Cause I can take you to the, I can drive you anywhere you want, I can take care of you here, and then we can, it's closer to the market office, the home office, so I can take you over there." So -- 'cause she had to sign checks and stuff -- so what happened really was that before Christmas we moved to, probably about a week later, so we, before Christmas, we moved to the southwestern Seinan area of L.A. where, because of a strict covenant, all the, lot of Japanese lived there. This is in the Adam's Boulevard, Jefferson, Arlington, Vermont kind of area. Not Jefferson, I'm sorry, Expo, Exposition, that area where all the Japanese, cluster of Japanese lived there, and this is where the Centenary used to have a church and this is where the Seinan, Senshin had a Buddhist church, and this is the area that they lived. And we were just out, just west of that area; we're just on Arlington. My father's partner who's found this place that didn't have restricted covenants, and so he bought the property there.

TI: Now, why was it your mother and not a partnership with this Nisei who was married to your father's partner? Why was she in charge?

MT: Well, because she was older, much older, and my mother had worked in the market, so she knew something about it and because of her curiosity as well as need would ask my father things and my father would tell her things when she would ask, so she had some rudimentary knowledge about it. She didn't, she hadn't supervised anybody. Whenever we had a store opening she always went to help. That lady, she had small kids, she didn't go. She always went there and so for several days she would be at a new store opening, or during Christmas she would go help, when they're having a, some place would be having a, and she'd go there to help and other things. And then she would be involved sometimes with something happening at the store or something like that 'cause she was very good with people. And so she had that, she already had a connection and I presume people respected her, so, so she was basically supposed to run the thing. The problem was that people were not patronizing our stores and, because of the war, and so they were losing money, lot of money in, particularly some stores, so the people in the office advised her to close these stores because it was such a, it was such a cash drain, and as far as our individual bank accounts, all Issei's bank accounts were frozen except for a hundred dollars a month, after a while, not the beginning but after a while. So she, so they were telling her to close it, but she said, "I can't do that, 'cause if I close the stores, how will the work people, the people that I've employed, be able to eat? They have no income, so I can't close it." So she kept the stores open until every one of them were evacuated.

TI: And where did she get the money, if the assets were frozen, I mean, how does she get cash?

MT: The company had money.

TI: Okay.

MT: The company had money. So what happened is that essentially she spent all the reserves that we had and she paid off all her debts. There was no debt that she did not pay, pay off. So she ended up, we ended up having no money in the business, and my, my mother said that her biggest disappointment was when one store, the manager left -- I mean, one store, the home office got a call from the, from the market saying, "Hey, you haven't opened up your produce section," so they went over there and found out that the manager was evacuated but didn't tell anybody, and so that was a big disappointment, that somebody would do that to her.

TI: That someone would just leave or the fact that, that she felt a obligation to the store to have the, the...

MT: They just left. No, just tell 'em they're leaving, 'cause if they said was leaving then she would made arrangements to close and everything else. They had produce there, they had all kinds of stuff there, yet he didn't, he just left.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.