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TI: Now, do you ever think about, if you weren't drafted in the military, what do you think would've happened to you?

YU: I'd probably be, I probably would've been going back with them.

TI: Interesting how your life could've been very different.

YU: Right, right. And I tried to tell my mother that, when I got discharged in December, I flew into Tule Lake -- not Tule Lake, I took a flight out of Joplin, Missouri, and came as fast as I could to stop my mother from going back into, at Tule Lake. And she said, well, she was gonna go back. I said, "Look, the war's over. And everything, things are not going good in Japan, so stay here and we'll start all over again." And she said, "Well, the two younger boys have gone back, so I said I will go back and see that they're taken care of."

TI: Wow. That must've been a pretty difficult time for you, to see your family being affected so much that they're going to Japan, even to a war-torn country, a place that's really difficult to live in. They're going and you're watching this. So what were you thinking at this point?

YU: Well, I thought that was a dumb move, but what else can you say? And they went home, my dad said when he went back, the first time, he had expanded the farm and fixed the home up, and so he thought he had a place to go. Well, things changed, with MacArthur saying that anybody been out of the country for over twenty-five years or something like that, or had not attended the farm in twenty-five years, whoever was in the, on the farm, it belongs to them.

TI: So essentially your father was stripped of his ownership rights.

YU: That's right, so weren't going back there. He didn't have any rights.

TI: So it was very, it must've been a very, very difficult time for your father.

YU: It was. It was very difficult. But they're survivors, and they, he moved on with things.

TI: Now, how about your brothers? Did they eventually, did any of them return to the United States?

YU: Yeah, they did, but before they returned they were involved in a lot of things in Japan. My brother knew that Japan was defeated, so he knew that the construction was very important. So he got into contractor work and he did a lot of contracting in construction.

TI: And this is your, Sam?

YU: Yeah. And he helped many of the Niseis and Kibeis that had come back from Japan, I mean from the United States.

TI: For jobs, you mean?

YU: For jobs, yeah.

TI: And were these contracts more like occupation kind of?

YU: Occupation, right. And since he could speak in both Japanese and English, he could work with 'em. And so my younger brother, George, told me that he did a lot of construction in the area. The occupation forces needed someone that can lead the thing, so like the airport at Sendai that got washed out with the tsunami, my brother said, "Sam built that."

TI: Interesting. Again, it's interesting how lives can change so dramatically, and how your brothers, both older and younger, ended up in Japan right after the war.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.