<Begin Segment 9>

SY: So your parents, then, do you know now why they, that they answered "no-no" to the, to the questionnaire and that's why they were at Tule?

GN: Yeah, it's in the, I got hold of the copy of the questionnaire they filled out. They indicated on there that their constitutional rights were being violated and...

SY: So they didn't answer, they didn't give a yes or no answer. They...

GN: It was a conditional. "No" because their rights were being violated.

SY: And your mother and father both, they answered it the same or differently?

GN: In a similar way.

SY: And so now, when the war was still going on, do you know that they decided to go back to Japan? Do you remember that, or when...

GN: I don't know when they decided that, but they had mentioned that given the, being so restricted and incarcerated, that they wanted to return to Japan.

SY: And did they talk to you about that, or did, was that just something that... 'cause you mentioned something about the Kibei really talking more openly about camp.

GN: They did, yeah. So they would talk to us about those things too from time to time.

SY: So can you give us a little kind of a sense of what they would say or how they would say it? Were they mainly talking about the U.S. and Japan or how terrible it was in the camps? Or what kinds of things would they say?

GN: Yeah, well, they didn't feel that they had equal rights and that, given that they're incarcerated, they'd mention about the German and Italians not being incarcerated too.

SY: Wow, so that was, they would talk about, as openly during the time, while you were still in camp.

GN: In camp, yeah.

SY: And do you know why? Were they adamant about going back to Japan?

GN: I don't remember that, but I know that they wanted to go back to Japan.

SY: They wanted to go back. And so what ultimately happened?

GN: And then there was, because you have these extreme activists in our, at least our part of the camp, they're saying, were saying that, no, Japan had really won the war and that they're just trying to deceive everybody. And so my parents didn't think that was true, so my mom sent a letter to her older sister in Hawaii and the letter came back that said, "Don't be a fool, Japan is devastated. You're going to be starving if you went to Japan." And so the two of them, my father and mother decided better just stay here.

SY: And do you know when that was when they decided? Was it very close to the end of the war?

GN: That was after the war.

SY: Oh, after the war, so they were still in camp in, at Tule.

GN: Yeah. And there were already people preparing theirselves to go to Japan. So they had applied for a hearing before the WRA to rescind the request to go to Japan and instead stay here, and so finally they did go to the hearing and they indicated to them that the kids' never been to Japan and they don't want to go to Japan, and so they granted the request and so we stayed. So now the waiting period, when are they going to release us? You could see a lot of people going to Japan, leaving Tule Lake, and so we were one of the few people that didn't go to Japan. And we had another relatives named Hatakiyama, they didn't go to Japan either, so I'm sure they probably talked to each other.

SY: Right, as a family decision. You had other relatives at Tule besides the Hatakiyamas?

GN: Yeah, my father's older brother, but they went back to Japan, and they had a hard time.

SY: So then as people were leaving and you decided, or your parents decided to go, not to go back, then what happened next?

GN: Finally got release paper, and we had another relatives that were, didn't go to Tule Lake so they must have not answered "no-no," simple "yes-yes," 'cause they stayed in Rohwer during the duration of the war. And so they went, they got out of camp fairly early and they rented a house across the street from the Higashi Hongwanji, in fact, directly across on Mott Street, and they invited us to stay with them for a little while until we got situated. And so they picked us up at, I remember, at the Union Station in L.A., and so we lived there with them for about three months. And in the meantime, during that time my father worked as a carpenter and eventually he got a job working for Southern Pacific Railroad in Norwalk, and they have a, what's called section house where they have a dwelling for lodging and then they have a community bathroom, and a family could live in those facilities.

SY: So it was pretty meager.

GN: Yeah. And he did, my father did that for about a year, but it was a backbreaking job because you had to carry these railroad ties as well as railroad, and he started having back problems. And then he found a position as a tenant farmer on a flower farm in Norwalk, and so we moved from there, from the section house, the Southern Pacific Railroad section house, to a farm in Norwalk.

SY: So did you go to school in, when you first came out of, out of camp? Were you --

GN: Oh yeah. I remember going to, was it the First Street School? It was an elementary school near First Street. Might've been the Third Street School, I'm not sure.

SY: But for a very short time.

GN: Yeah, the three month period. And then from there I attended school in Norwalk.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.