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BN: Now, with your father, were you able to, at some point now start writing, exchanging letters and so on?

NK As far as I can remember, I believe there was some communication from my father to my mother when we were at Manzanar, and that's how we found out where he was at, Missoula, Montana. And that's when correspondence started again. One thing I do remember is letters were all censored, and so you'd have a letter that you'd be reading, all of a sudden there's a blank spot that they cut out. And this was typical of the enemy alien camps that existed. But Missoula, Montana, was one of the first camps that they went to. He also just went from place to place in the United States, and the next one of the camps was at Bismarck, North Dakota. There was... from there... to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and then to Livingston, Louisiana, and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And we were supposed to join up with my father and the rest of the family at Manzanar. We were supposed to go to Crystal City (Texas), because we had (also) applied for the prisoner exchange on the Gripsholm. But as it turned out, all those days fell through, and so my father ended up in Santa Fe. And after finding out that he had cancer, they released him to join the rest of the family that was in Manzanar. So this was early '43, probably, that he joined us and we went toTule Lake.

BN: Did he come before or after the "loyalty questionnaire"?

NK: That was going around during that period. So naturally he had many reasons to return to Japan, and one is his mother was still there. His daughter, my sister Chiyeko, was still in Japan. He had accumulated what he could in land and bamboo forest in Japan to live off of. And when the "no-no" questionnaire came out, there was no question on his part. He was going back to Japan.

BN: Was the family in touch with Chiyeko, the sister that was in Japan at that time?

NK: I want to think that we got a letter through the Red Cross, but that area is so vague for me, that I would say no, that we had no correspondence.

BN: What was... you're eleven, twelve, was your reaction to your father returning? How did he seem to you?

NK: Well, in my eleven, twelve years old, when we were in Venice, my father and mother naturally were out in the field from morning 'til night, you might say, and so we ate dinner together. But it was not a typical family life like you would think of it today. Because even my family, as we were raising the kids, my wife took care of the kids and I would see them at night, but we had weekends and things like that. But my timing in 1941... '42, I had no such close contact with my father. And so it was almost like a, more like a brother than a father. It was just the way life was in those days.

BN: And what were your feelings about possibly having to go to Japan?

NK: Well, for me, I was kind of happy thinking that I'd see my sister. Surprisingly, I remembered quite a few of the details of the home in Shiga-ken.

BN: From when you were there when you were five?

NK: Right, on that vacation, one-month vacation that we took in 1935. So I had some good memories. And I was kind of happy thinking that there was a place for us to go and there'd be a place for us to stay.

BN: You mentioned your father had cancer. How was he affected by that?

NK: Back in, during the war, I had never heard of the word "cancer." But in the shuffling of my father from camp to camp, when he was at Livingston, Louisiana, he went to the hospital and they diagnosed that he had cancer of the rectum. And they, that he had a cancer, the authorities let my mother and my brother visit him from Manzanar. They had to go to Louisiana to see how my father was. This had to be in 1942, latter part of '42. But anyway, they drive across the United States. I was telling my daughter that, come to think of it, it was kind of a scary thing for them -- my brother, who was a Kibei from Japan, that wasn't very strong with his English, and my mother who spoke no English at all. (They would) get on the train and bus and travel from one end of the United States to Louisiana. But somehow they made it and saw my father, and they came all the way back. Because my father had cancer, several months later, they allowed him to return to Manzanar to join us. This is right before the segregation in the camps happened. So soon after he came to Manzanar, we all were shipped to Tule Lake and we stayed in one apartment in Tule Lake.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.