<Begin Segment 7>

BN: And then what happens now with you and your mother in terms of leaving camp?

AK: So there's nowhere to go, so we decide to go to Chicago, but we stay in camp and we take one of the last trains. So we take one of the last trains from Heart Mountain to Chicago, and that's sort of an interesting contrast because I'm four or five. So there's a lot of GIs riding the trains, so here's this little Japanese kids, and the soldiers were, they're playing with me. So I'm sitting on their duffel bags and all that kind of stuff, you're in a concentration camp, and here you are playing with GIs who had just come back from the Pacific, that are trying to get back to the Midwest or some of these other places. So it's this sort of irony kind of thing.

BN: And then why Chicago?

AK: Well, because everybody else was there, Clara and Joe Y. had gone there so that he could go chick sexing in Iowa and some of the Midwest area. My grandma was living there. The apartment house had another room downstairs on the first floor, and so it was just a bedroom. And then upstairs, the second floor or third floor is where Clara had a family unit. And so when you enter, there'd be a bedroom off to the side, and then there would be a living room, kitchen, and then another bedroom. So Grandma would be up there, and then Louise was downstairs. So everybody was in that same apartment.

BN: So you had a, kind of a ready, set place to go when you left?

AK: Right. And then our neighbors and our friends and people from the Olivers, they were in that same, quote, "neighborhood." It was a walk, but you'd go down to the main street over here and so forth. We were forty-five blocks south of the downtown, so the south side.

BN: Was there a cluster of other Japanese in that area?

AK: Yes. They weren't right in our building, but they were down, scattered. Because down there would be the Walgreens and it would be the movie house and some of these other things, we were in more of a neighborhood-neighborhood of apartment houses, brownstones. And we were so many blocks away from the lake. So there was the L, the Elevated, and then on the other side would be the lake. We would have a good time trying to get to the lake and so forth. Then you take the Elevated, which was close, and you'd go downtown. So like my aunt, Kimiko, my father's sister, older sister, she would be working in a department store downtown, and Louise would be working down there. When Joe was discharged, they lived in Chicago for a while. And then when my dad was discharged, we were still living there, so everybody would use that next year, approximately, to sort of get their feet under them. And then we decided that we would get a car, so they went to Detroit to get, pick the car up and drive back to Chicago. And then that's the car that my mom and dad and I rode across the U.S. to get to Los Angeles.

BN: Route 66?

AK: Yeah. And we would go to, actually, we went a little further north because we went to Denver, because my grandfather was there. My grandfather refused to go back to the West Coast.

BN: This is which one?

AK: Suski.

BN: The Suski group.

AK: The Kumamoto one went to Chicago, and then moves to Los Angeles with my aunt. By then, my aunt and my grandfather are living together, so to speak.

BN: And then you'd mentioned you kind of grew up with Miki in camp, but their family...

AK: Okay, then they moved from there to New York to Larchmont. He gets a job, Bob gets a job with Terrytoons, Heckle and Jeckle and Mighty Mouse. And they have a studio in Terrytown, which is, you have basically in that northern, north of New York, you've got the white suburbs, and I say white because that's where IBM is, that's where Terrytoons is, and some of these other studios and things like that. It's just north of downtown, but not in downtown, or not in Manhattan.

BN: So was their family in Chicago first?

AK: No, they went directly.

BN: Okay, they went directly to Larchmont. So you really didn't grow up with Miki after camp?

AK: We would visit. I think, let's see, '45, in 1945 is when we were coming back to Los Angeles. But I think in '49, we went to visit them in Larchmont, that area.

BN: So how long were you and your mom in Chicago, then?

AK: Oh, just a year or so, couple years.

BN: While your dad deployed?

AK: Well, because he had to... so he stayed, so he went to Korea, and he stayed so that he could go to Japan and then go around Japan and visit some of the relatives and try to find how the relatives are doing. Joe, meantime, went with MacArthur, so this is a bit of trivia, too, he was part of the team that wrote the Japanese constitution, modeled after the U.S. Constitution. So how do you translate certain words, or concepts, basically, in English to Japanese? They just don't necessarily fit. And NHK, when they were reviewing the whole constitution, and people were questioning the pacifists' attitude in the constitution, wanted to interview my uncle Joe, but he was part of the American team and then there was the Japanese team and all the politics.

BN: Did your mom work while you were in Chicago?

AK: No, not that I recall.

BN: And then, if you're there for a year or so, you must have gone to school there?

AK: No.

BN: You didn't?

AK: No. And I was sick as a kid, and I would have been, like, kindergarten, so you don't have to go to kindergarten. That's why, when we came back, I was supposed to go to first grade. And I think I waited a little bit.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.