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BN: Oh, and then I wanted to also ask you about, in your memoir you wrote a little bit about the black market.

NK: Oh, yeah. 1946, '47, things were... I keep talking about there was lack of food. Well, farmers, if they grow rice, each year, the government will say, "For each acre, you have to produce so much rice." And then they have to sell that to the government and, in turn, the government will ration that out. They had a rationing system. And so they would ration that out to the rest of the cities and such, whether it was a city or (in the) villages or wherever. But the farmers, naturally, they don't want to give their... sell their rice then to the government because they paid very low prices for it. But, (in turn), what they would do is they would pool a little bit of (that rice) and kind of hide it, and have a stash of their own, you might say. And so what the farmers did was these people from the city would come out to the country and buy the rice, vegetables, foodstuffs, from the farmers that were stashing these things waiting for these people to come to buy it. And this was the black market system that existed, and a lot of the people that were in the black market business were Koreans that were... came to Japan or forced to come to Japan during the war. And they were rough and tumble people that got on the train, came out to the villages in the country and bought up the stuff, take it back to the city and double the price and sell it. That was the way of living for people. Food was available if you had the money, okay, so there's a distinction there between not having food and, yes, the food is there, but it's just a matter of money.

BN: The other thing I wanted to ask you about was, you had the one sister, Chiyeko, who had stayed in Japan throughout. What became of her?

NK: Okay, Chiyeko stayed in Japan during the war, stayed with my grandmother. During the war she got married to a Japanese citizen, and he was also in Shiga-ken, but at the northern tip of the prefecture. They had one child who grew up and moved to Kyoto, and at Kyoto he was... worked as a conductor on the train from Kyoto to Osaka, the Kansai airport. They had a special train running back and forth to accommodate the people on the train and airplane. Chiyeko got divorced from this person, and in Japan, a divorce is a very no-no thing. But she couldn't take it anymore, so she divorced him and then I worked out papers and got my... in fact, once I settled down and got over here, I brought back my mother, my sister Chiyeko, and paperwork also for my brother and his family, and got them all back to the United States. This happened between (1946) to 1958. In that period, that all had transpired.

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