<Begin Segment 15>

TI: So can you talk about your father's friend who was murdered?

KG: He worked for the co-op company, the co-op business, so he dealt with a lot of Caucasians. And so he had the reputation of being pro-American, so he was murdered.

TI: And was this sort of... so who killed him? Was it ever kind of, someone...

KG: No, they never established it. I had some Kibei friends who told me, "It's easy to murder someone, all you have to do is have a knife and go up to the person and perform the seppuku on the person."

TI: And do you know how this person was killed, was it with a knife?

KG: Yeah, he was murdered, I think he was murdered with a knife.

TI: And so after...

KG: There were no guns, but you can get a knife without any problem.

TI: And so it was after this incident that your father decided the family needed to leave.

KG: Yeah. He went down right away and we started packing at three o'clock in the morning, the army truck pulled up, and we took off.

TI: So the administration understood the tension, so they got your family out right away.

KG: Oh, yeah.

TI: And it must have been a very frightening time for you and your family.

KG: Yeah.

TI: And so you said at three a.m. the truck came up and you loaded up and then left.

KG: Yeah.

TI: And at three a.m., where did you go? Where did they hold you?

KG: We went down to Sacramento for a few days to look over some things and then we took off for Philadelphia.

TI: Do you recall about what time, the date of when you left the camp? Like the year... I'm just to get a sense of when that happened.

KG: It would have been, what, '44. '45?

TI: '45?

KG: (It was June 14, 1945). Because I went to college, when I got to Philadelphia, the government had a student relocation office, and I went there right away to find out about college. I wanted to get going because I'd lost two years at least. They had a record of the schools that would accept Japanese students from the camps and all, and the one college had just registered that they would accept students, and they offered a scholarship, so I jumped at that.

TI: Now, why did your family choose Pennsylvania?

KG: We had friends who ran the hostel. In fact, (it was) the lady that ran the Japanese school, (the family) were our very close friends.

TI: The Japanese school in Sacramento that you went to?

KG: Yeah, uh-huh. They were family friends, and we've known them all along, and we knew they had relocated there. And they ran the hostel, you know, it was like the boarding house that the Japanese people came from camps, and then they looked for jobs after.

TI: And this was in Philadelphia?

KG: Yeah.

TI: Now was there any thought, if this were 1945, the West Coast was actually open at that time?

KG: No.

TI: Okay, it actually...

KG: We had to go east.

TI: You had to go east, okay.

KG: The war was still on.

TI: So there was no thought of staying closer to the West Coast.

KG: No, we couldn't, we weren't allowed to go back west. (Narr. note: The war was still on and we were encouraged to go east. There may have been some people who had gone back earlier before the war ended, I'm not certain.)

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.