<Begin Segment 28>

MN: How did you hear that the war had ended?

RN: It was on the newspaper, that's all.

MN: How did you feel when you heard the war had ended?

RN: Well, I don't feel nothin'. I was on the, in the Chicago Loop and people were just milling around, talking. Nobody bothered you. You would think somebody, they'd come up and beat you up or something, but back there everybody mind their own business. How could they know if you were Japanese or Chinese? They don't know Orientals in those days.

MN: Your parents are from Hiroshima. Did you lose any relatives in the atomic bombing?

RN: I had no relatives in Japan. My folks never mentioned, when my father was living and my mother was living and all that, they never once discussed, all the time I was living they never discussed their relatives or my relatives in Japan, like cousins or uncles. It was a funny thing. Yeah, it was, all I know is they're from Hiroshima and that was it.

MN: So once the war was over did you return to Los Angeles?

RN: Not right away. Not right away.

MN: What did you do after the war?

RN: Well, I kept up my job, and I didn't know how long they're gonna keep me there. It was a big, big factory and I don't know, I kept workin' there. The pay was good. And so I didn't learn a trade or anything, so anyway, you think, when you're young you think, well, I'd like to go back to Los Angeles, but everybody was saying, "If you go back to Los Angeles, what you gonna do?" But I did a lot of things and everything happened so fast that, and it's a lot of little things. I did a lot of things. I didn't want to stay in Chicago. I said to myself, hell with this town. Dirty old Chicago, I says, living in these tenement houses. But yeah, so what I did, I was still workin' and drawing my paycheck, I put a ad in the, I wrote to the Seattle, not the Seattle Times but the L.A. Times. I don't know how I did it, I don't know if I bought a Los Angeles Times paper or not, but I think I did. Anyway, I put a ad in the want ads section in the L.A. paper, you know the want ads. So I don't know exactly what happened. I says wanted, job in L.A. Three lines I made, contact, my address. And sure enough, this guy contacted me from Los Angeles. He says he's got a chicken hatchery, he, "wants somebody to work in my chicken hatchery." And I wrote back to him. Yeah, I says, I'm interested. But I don't recall the pay or whereabouts, where it was or anything. He says, I got a job for you. So I talked to my brother, I told my brother, says, you stay with my mother -- 'cause he was going around with his girlfriend before he got married. He got married later on. But so, "You stay with my mother here, I'm goin' back to Los Angeles. I got a job offer somehow."

So we agreed it, agreed on that. I went back there by myself on a train, and my one sister was already back in L.A., and he came to pick me up on the train down at Union Station, and I stayed with him. And he took me out to this chicken farm out in Cypress and I talked to the guy. "Yeah," he said, "I got a hatchery here. I need somebody to help take care of the hatchery and feed my chickens, all that." So I said okay. I don't even know how much he paid me, and I had no furniture or nothing, just a bare room. He says, "This is where you stay." I had a stove there, but nothing else. And so I said okay, and I don't know how in the hell I got by living there, bedding or anything. All I had was my suitcase and my overcoat. Anyway, I worked there for a while, just getting by, and, oh, the hell with this guy, I says. I'm workin' hard. So I quit. I told him the hell with the job, I says I don't want... so I went back to L.A. and stayed with my sister. They were, they came back, they had those three kids too and they're living in a small house up here somewhere. Not here, but at Boyle Heights.

I had to go back to Chicago to pick up my, pick up my mother. I go back there and in the meantime, somewhere along the line my brother got married back there, and he, so he stayed in Chicago, him and his wife and all that. So anyway, things happened pretty fast. I picked up my mother, we came back, came back to L.A., and we stayed with my, stayed with my sister, real crowded. And good thing I came back here; the house that I was living in before the war, up here in Lorena Street, it was open. The Italian people, the owner, he says yeah, the house is open, so we went back and stayed in the same house that we had to move out of. [Laughs] Right up there on Lorena Street. Yeah, it was, but it was pretty hectic in those days.

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