<Begin Segment 10>

TI: So you take a train to Cincinnati, I recall from the movie, I think it was a relative in Cincinnati, that's why you went to Cincinnati?

SI: My father's aunt.

TI: So how long did the family stay in Cincinnati?

SI: We stayed there, I think it may have been just a couple of years, maybe three years at the most. It was a difficult time for my parents, even though they had relatives, they had to find work and so the family members helped my father get a job.  My mother had these two young children, and she wrote in her diary that, "I don't know what to do, the landlord is telling is I have to keep the children quiet. I can't keep them quiet so I take them outside, but it's snowing outside, so we're trying to go someplace where we're not in the house and the landlords isn't going to complain." So I think they finally decided that they needed to go back to San Francisco, back to Japantown.

TI: When you say it was hard for your parents, so you talked about your mother, what made it hard for your father?

SI: I know less about that experience of my father's. His poetry didn't continue, although he wrote all through camp. His poetry didn't continue in Cincinnati, it continued when we got back to San Francisco. Because I think he was struggling to support the family, taking whatever job he could get, and finding his way back to having some personal power and dignity. I think he, in many ways, I feel like, as the man and head of the household, the camp experience really emasculated him, and the decision then to not go to Japan was very hard for him. My mother is the one who said, "We cannot take our children back to a defeated country where there's no food for the children." So they're writing these letters back and forth, and my father is, in this very Japanese way, saying, "We can't go back to Japan just because they won and not go because they lost." And my mother is writing to him saying, "The children will starve to death. We can't let that happen." So he realizes that this is a true condition and agrees, they planned the strategy through these secret letters that they wrote, that he stripped his bedsheet and wrote on cloth letters and then sewed them inside of his pants pocket, and my mother did the same. And how they figured out that they would wait until the last boat came up, and he then began to have contact with Wayne Collins and understood that they could resist the deportation.

TI: That communication that they sewed into the pants, so this was a pair of pants that he would send back and forth to get, like, adjusted, right?

SI: Yeah, he said, "They need mending."

TI: "My waist is too tight."

SI: "Tight," right. [Laughs]

TI: And so that communication that they were going back and forth were hidden, that would have all been censored and not, you think, allowed back and forth?

SI: You know, I found a hundred and eighty-two letters that they had exchanged, and many of them I would open up, they had the envelopes, and open it up and they'd just be, like, flaps of paper because the censors...

TI: Just blacked out everything.

SI: Yeah, they cut with a razor. And so one of the letters, my mother writes about my brother being sick, and the idea of getting on the ship was, like, too hard for her to bear. And on the bottom she writes, "Dear Censor, for the sake of my children, please do not cut this letter." It's one of the few letters that had no cuts in it. But then she writes in her diary, "Today, I found a letter that Daddy had hidden inside of the waistband," because he writes and says, "My waist, please fix the waistband." So he would unstitch it, and he stripped his bedsheet and he'd write on the cloth, fold it up and stick it in there. I asked my mother about this, and she said he would also stitch the letter inside the lining of the pants pocket. So she also wrote letters back to him that way, but I never found those. I only found the ones that my father sent.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.