<Begin Segment 13>

BN: Now, what happened with your parents?

EO: My parents, okay, when they got back, it was a different story. The place was a mess, because no one lived there, and the basement was ransacked, so they lost a lot of stuff.

BN: But they still owned the building?

EO: But they had the home. And they rented the upstairs to about two or three families, because there was no housing. And one of my girlfriends' father, when I went over one day, he was on his hands and knees crying, begging my dad for a place to stay. My dad said, "I don't have any more space. How can I house you?" So he must hate my father, but under the circumstances, my dad said that's all he could do. But there must have been a lot of families like that, no home. That's what makes me so mad. Because the government took everybody's houses away, why didn't they provide houses when they came out? They closed the camps, that's the least they could have done. They didn't do it, I don't know why.

BN: What did your father and mother do for a living at that point? Because the store was kind of gone.

EO: Oh, yeah. They needed money, so my mother went to clean houses. My sister cleaned houses, and my father gardened. He didn't have money to start a new store. And my sister, one of the ladies accused her of stealing something from her, and that made my mother so angry, she made a special trip over to that lady, and she says, "I didn't not raise my daughter to steal." Told her off. [Laughs]

BN: Did your father retain, he was such a patriotic man, did this whole experience kind of change him in that way, or did he remain...

EO: I often wonder. He's very, still patriotic, very patriotic, but the contradiction, I don't know. I know he was very active at city hall after the war, and he helped start a sister city with some place in Shizuoka. In fact, they gave him a (monument where it stood in the Mishima Sister City Square). He came home changed, though. All he did was brag, brag, all the time. He wasn't, I don't know, he was just different.

BN: Did your mother, after '52, Issei could become citizens. Did your mother become a U.S. citizen after that?

EO: She did, she became a U.S. citizen. She studied, she got to know her history. They were still very active in the sister city program, and they took care of all the students who came, let them stay at the house.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.