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AI: Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the attitudes of the Caucasians after the war, shortly after the war. And you mentioned that there were some Japanese farms and families that were vandalized.

KM: Well my cousin, Jack's cousins, he had a great big, I don't know how many acres he has, but it's a vineyard, and peaches and so forth. And then this, well, it started with Chavez, if you know who, that union. They came early one morning and put nail all where the tractor or the car would come, the workers would come. And all his hired workers' car would be flat when came in. That's how the first started. And so he had a hard, 'cause he came home rather, he was one of the first ones to come back. And he had a quite a hard time, 'cause they really, they didn't want them back.

AI: Right after the war?

KM: Right after war. Uh-huh. So I know that was one of the incidents. And then they would clean up all the nails. And then somehow during the night, they can't hear because the roads are kinda far apart for the workers. And there were all these tacks.

AI: So for a while there was...

KM: Yeah there was.

AI: ...a negative feeling?

KM: Yeah, and then even, we experienced it even ourselves when we were the last ones, end of the year in '45. We went to shopping, and you know when you go to the cashier, we all line up. And then we were next in line. And then there's another one that came later and then the cashier motioned to them to come first and they just kept us standing there. So we just walked out. That was the first thing that we... and then another thing was we looked for a church home after we came back. And then...

AI: What do you mean by church home?

KM: Well, we wanted to find a church that we could call home and that would be our home -- I mean our regular going or attending church. And since the Church of Christ people -- the missionaries were Church of Christ people -- they told us to go to Fowler's Church of Christ before you join any other church, because we want you to go there. Well, minister came to call on us the first day, and they said, "I have to go back and ask the congregation if they would accept you. But as far as I'm concerned you're welcome to join." And so he went back and I guess he had a congregational meeting. And he came back and he said, "I'm so sorry to tell you this terrible news. I would accept you with open arms, but my congregation, there was more opposition than yes's. So we can't accept you." And that was just, maybe just one or two months after we came out of camp. And so that was a real blow to us because, you know the Bible says, "In Christ there is no east, west, north, south." And so they said that everybody would love you, the way they were telling us. But there was still lot of war hysteria left that maybe they had, maybe their son were in the army and got killed or something. But just because we were Japanese, they kinda blamed it onto us. So that was a blow to us, too. But my, Jack's classmate heard about all this incident, and he belonged to a Presbyterian church. And he came over and he said he would be very glad if we would come there, and so we've been Presbyterian ever since. [Laughs]

<End Segment 42> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.