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BN: And then what happens now when you get back to, this is your father's home, right?

NK: Yes. I guess it was Shiga-ken, but when we got back to Shiga-ken, that's where my father's home was. We got our way back to the house, and the village is probably two miles from the main train station. And when we got there, the surprised look on the people -- when I say "people," it'd be my grandmother, my aunt and her daughter -- they were in... they had to move from Kyoto, the city of Kyoto and come back to live in my father's house during the war. And they didn't have an inkling that we were going to come from the United States back to Japan. And so they literally stood there with their mouth open saying, "What are you doing here?" (They said), "Why did you come back to this place when there's nothing here?" (But naturally), we didn't know anything like that... what was in store for us. It was a big, big shock to both sides, the people in Japan and our family that put our things together and pulled up to our own home to find that somebody else was occupying it.

BN: So how did you make ends meet?

NK: At first, the first few days, things were... relatives were happy and offered us some food and so forth. But within a week, reality set in and all that food that was being passed around disappeared, and the relatives were asking, "What are you going to do?" Well, naturally, we couldn't chase out my aunt and her daughter, so they took a portion of the house and then the rest of the house was occupied by the rest of the family. The main focus at that time was, "What are we going to eat next? Where are we going to get it from?" And that was the biggest problem the whole family had, and that had to be true with all the other ones too... other people that went back from Tule Lake. Starting with our family, my father knew immediately that he had to start doing some farming to get the food on the table, so he knew what his role was at the time. But by then, this was after he had his cancer operation, and so he was struggling along and a real, real tough situation. But he was determined to get his farm growing and get some food on the table. My brother said that he's going to go to Kyoto, which is like half hour, forty-five minutes from the village, and get a job and move out to Kyoto. Well, so he got a job, but he was commuting every day, and that was really, really hard when you've got a wife at home and a baby boy that's less than a year old. But he was determined to move out to Kyoto for a better life. My mother, she wanted to help my father, and so she took on a man's job to work out in the field. Farming, it just doesn't happen... you can't just plant a seed today and go out there and pick a turnip tomorrow, so it was a long road ahead, but that's what she was doing.

My sister, Kazuye, just graduated high school... eighteen years old... the father and mother said, "What are we going to do with Kazuye?" And they pondered and weren't sure, but there was a Buddhist priest that we knew from Los Angeles that said, "Well, we'll take care of her." And so they sent my sister over to Kyoto where they had the Buddhist temple, and they lodged her at a smaller temple within Kyoto, and found her a job at a department store called Takashimaya. And it's a large department store, but not as, some of the larger ones that exist right now, but it was a well-known regular department store. So anyway, she moved to Kyoto and went to work for Takashimaya as a salesperson, but Kazuye was not a strong person physically. And the life with no... lack of nutritious food and so forth, she got pleurisy, and not long after that, it turned into TB. And two years after we landed, she passed away from, I'd say malnutrition, and it was alack of medication, naturally. They just... first time I heard of penicillin and streptomycin. But those are the types of medicine they were talking about, but it was not available to people like us and my sister. We were too far down the line (there). It was very, very unfortunate for my sister.

So that left myself, and my father was working his farm with my mother. After a year... he worked about a year, and then he passed away. By then, I was working with my mother in the field and she says that she's got to get this crop of rice to keep going. And so I promised my mother that I would work one year to finish this crop, and you'll get on your feet and you can get going. And so, I moved back to the city (Kyoto)... from the city to Miyanishi, which is the village that our parents are from, and I started the farming cycle of growing rice. And everything was, naturally, new to me. I didn't even know one thing from another, but everything was watching what other people do and learn as you go along. And somehow or other, we struggled through that first year and we got a crop of rice. And that was enough for my mother to get started, and so I went back out to Kyoto and got a job with the United States Army. And we were classified as "foreign nationals." In other words, we weren't in the army. We weren't civilians working for them. But I worked at the Kyoto Hotel as a telephone operator, and (this was) because we had the English language, and what little Japanese we knew was enough to interpret and so forth. So I worked as a telephone operator for one year there at the Kyoto Hotel. And the Kyoto Hotel was very well-known for being one of the first-class hotels. It even had the emperor of Japan stay there on occasions. So it was a new experience for me -- coming out of a camp at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and never held a paying job. But the main thing was while working for the Kyoto Hotel, it was under U.S. Army control, and it was used as a U.S. Army officers billet. In other words, it was all the officers' quarters. The wages that we were paid was minimal. In fact, it was almost like getting a roll of toilet paper, you might say. It was worthless, but that they did was they gave us lodging, and they gave us three meals a day. And the three meals a day was a big, big help in surviving. And we ate the same food that the U.S. army officers did, so we were very happy with that situation.

BN: How old were you at that time? You must have been sixteen?

NK: Sixteen, seventeen.

BN: They hired you that young?

NK: Oh, yeah. During that period, they were desperate for people that spoke English and Japanese, and my going to Japanese school in Venice before the war came in handy in this situation.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.