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TI: So let's move now, so we talked about sort of your perception of Germany during the war. How about Japan and Japanese? What was your sense about them?

JO: I got all of that from the cartoons and from the propaganda that was thrown at me. So that by the time I was... it was inbred in the comics and the movies. We never saw a movie that was in any way friendly to any Japanese. And there were no Japanese Americans in our community, none. There was one Chinese American in our community. And there were two African Americans in our community at the time. That's not true anymore.

TI: I'm curious, did you, by any chance, know the Chinese American family in your community?

JO: They didn't have, actually, didn't have any children, so we only knew them, there was somebody who ran the restaurant, there was somebody who ran... there was one family, but one worked in the restaurant, another had a laundry, another had a grocery.

TI: But they didn't have children going to school?

JO: No, there were no children.

TI: So this is kind of a good segue. Either right at the end of the war or right after the war, a Japanese American came to your town. So can you talk about that a little bit, who this person was and how you met her?

JO: Right. Her name was Ellen Yukawa, and her sister was Elaine, and she was slightly younger. And she arrived the first day of school, I think we were in sixth or seventh grade, I cannot remember. And at first we did not know if she could speak English, and then were shocked. She not only spoke English, she knew all the games we knew. She said that she came... I don't know that we ever asked her where she came from, but we knew that she did not come from Japan. And she never told us where she had been. And no one, it was not part of our history to know anything about the incarceration. And being as unworldly as we were, I think maybe we didn't ask.

TI: But yet you knew she wasn't from Japan, and she knew all the games that you played, so she seemed like kind of this typical American girl.

JO: Right. She was a very good student, she was very pretty, she was very friendly, she became a leader in our class. We were so happy to have new people come to our class. We lived in this very insular world. When I graduated -- I'm going to jump ahead -- when I graduated high school, there were sixty people in my class, and that was a big class. My husband's class the year before was even smaller because we were Depression babies. And so we were so ready for new faces and new people, and Ellen came as a shock to us. We didn't know where, we didn't know quite what to think about it. But the war was over, and Ellen says that the principal made an announcement. I don't remember the announcement.

TI: And do you recall what the announcement was?

JO: She recalls that the announcement was that there were two new people coming to our school, and it was on public service announcement that my father installed that sound equipment in the school, and that was how we got our news every day. And she says that he said he expected us to welcome them, and that was a sufficient notice to all of us that they were to be treated as friends. So I guess we never asked. I still don't understand how we never asked.

TI: And yet you knew that they were of Japanese ancestry.

JO: It was obvious they were of Japanese ancestry, and I think we knew they came from California.

TI: Now you got to know Ellen later on, so can you describe how she got there? She had a story of how she got to Monticello.

JO: Yes. Well, Ellen had been in Poston -- I found this out later -- Ellen had been in Poston I, and when the war ended, it was not safe for them to go back to their property. They were among the fortunate families. They had found friends, they had friends who had taken care of their property, and they could have gone home, but it wasn't safe there. And so her father decided that they would go east. And he took them by train, Ellen's mother, she tells the story of how her mother told them not to talk, but the soldiers on the train that were heading home befriended them, sang with them, played with them, and they ended up in Manhattan. They went to the Empire State Building, which is where the WRA offices were. And the only place that they could live was in a hostel in Brooklyn. And they lived there, her father, who had owned his own farm, I believe, and who, they were quite prosperous when they left. She described how he would go to work in his hat and his coat, and he was a pot and pan man in the hospital, washing pots and pans. But it was the only work he could get. Ultimately, Ellen's mother took a job as a housekeeper in Monticello, in our little town, with a very prosperous family that owned a very big house, and she brought the two girls to Sullivan County, to Monticello, and they lived in a house on Sackett Lake Road, which eventually, by coincidence, twenty years later -- maybe not twenty years later, ten years later -- my father-in-law bought, and ultimately gave to my husband and myself. And it's the house that we raised our family in, but Ellen lived in that house. I had no idea all of these cross currents were happening. She lived in that house.

TI: So the Yukawa family, so the father stayed in Brooklyn and the mother and the two daughters went to...

JO: To Monticello.

TI: Monticello.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.