<Begin Segment 30>

MN: Let me see, you left Cleveland in October '45, is that right?

BT: Yes.

MN: And then you, how long did you stay at Gila?

BT: Just a couple of days.

MN: Just a couple days, two or three nights, you stayed.

BT: Yeah.

MN: Then from Gila, you joined your family at Sanger. What did you do in Sanger?

BT: Well, I stayed with my family, and they were what they call tying vines. On this Thompson grapes, they'd prune it back and they'd leave four branches, two on each side, and you had to tie it down to the wire. We call it tying vines, and I done that for about three or four days, and I said, "This is not for me." So I wrote to my friend that lived in Inglewood, and he says, "Come on down." He says he'll put me up, so I was gone. Yeah, so I came down to L.A. February of '46.

MN: In the meantime, can you share with us what happened to your sister Kazumi, who went to Tule Lake?

BT: Yeah. She had cancer. I didn't know all this. And I know when she came back to Fresno, I happened to be there and she was weak -- and she had a two year old daughter -- and a few months later she passed away, cancer.

MN: But that family didn't go to Japan.

BT: No, no.

MN: They stayed here.

BT: Uh-huh.

MN: And so you came down here and you were living in Inglewood, California, and then were you living with your friend for a long time?

BT: I think it was about a month, month and a half. And then, of course, the father told my friend, he says, "It's about time you get on, on the road." So I says, "Okay, yeah, it's about time." And he knew that the Koyasan Temple, that was turned into a hostel, so I went over there, stayed there, and I was there about a month or so. Anyway, I was walkin' around East First Street, and I ran into this friend that I worked with in Gila. His parents had taken over a hotel right there on Central Avenue, so he says come and live with him. I says, "Well, I don't want to impose," this and that. "No," he says, says he's got a room by himself. So I said, "Oh, okay." So I moved in with him. This area was all black. In fact, all the, all the tenants were black.

MN: Did the blacks ever give you any trouble?

BT: Didn't give me any trouble, but my friend's father, he got held up a couple of times. One time he got beat up. I don't know why they want to... his father was a tiny man. He was elderly. Why they beat him up, I don't know.

MN: Now, you are in Los Angeles, and you visited your family in Sanger and you had this one bad experience while you were going up there. Can you share what happened?

BT: Yeah. I was visiting my family, and we went into Fresno. Then coming back, as I was getting into Sanger town, I seen this truck at the, he had the stop sign. I was on the main drag, and as I approached the intersection he pulled out and pulled out right in front of me. And so I swung over to the left to pass him, and he swung over to the left also. And I guess I turned my wheel and I went into this, off the road and into the field there. Luckily, it was just plowed, so the ground was soft, so that stopped me. Otherwise, I would've hit a telephone pole. And then, dumb me, got all excited and mad, and I got out of there and got back on the road and I went lookin' for the guy. And I'm thinking, after this happened -- I didn't find him, but after a while I said, "What a dummy." I says, "What if I found that guy? He would've beat me up." And I had a car full of kids. Yeah, but that was a bad situation.

MN: But he deliberately came at you?

BT: And forced me off. It, it's happened to other people, get forced off the road.

MN: Was it, was there still a lot of hostility, hostility at that time towards Japanese Americans?

BT: I guess, yeah. I think especially, especially the farmers because now these Japanese Americans are coming back, reclaiming their property, this and that.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.