<Begin Segment 19>

TI: So, Jimmy, I wanted to go back to a question. Earlier we were talking about your father and what he was like, and you said, well, there's a story about him after the war in San Francisco, that you got to know him a little bit better. Do you remember that, and how did you get to know your father better? What did he tell you after the war?

JN: Yeah, well, like I said, everything that he said in the past, you had to be able to speak Japanese. You have a Japanese face, you speak Japanese. By the time I got to talk to my father more often, that's when my two sisters were gone, my older brother, they're all gone, married, and all left was one of my sister and three brothers. I'll tell you a story. During dinnertime, my father always liked to read his paper, the Japanese newspaper. Slowly it was getting, the family was getting able to subscribe newspaper, because everybody worked. So he would read all the news to all of us eating. And at the end of the meal, everybody would stand up, and they didn't want to hear any more news, so one by one, they would disappear. I would be the last one to stand up, I stayed down, and it was a good time that I asked my father, why, or who started the war, Japanese and the United States? I never knew it 'til then. He told me it was mainly from the oil that they cut down. All the countries would get so much oil, and Japanese in Japan, they were not getting the same amount that they were getting before. They reduced the amount slowly, and that's how the war started, they needed that oil.

TI: So that oil embargo, where they stopped the flow of oil to Japan.

JN: And exactly what he told me was if you chase a mouse, and a mouse would run, try to run, but you corner the mouse and the mouse has nowhere to go, and that mouse will jump on you. And that was the simple example that Japan, they started the war, they bombed Pearl Harbor. That was the example that he wanted to tell me. And I said, oh, that's how the war started? So I didn't know who to blame, which country to blame.  So from there on, I got used to talking to my father. And he always liked to talk of politics, the Democrats this and that, the Republicans this and that. Until then, he didn't have anything to read since we left camp. He was really hurt in camp, there was nothing for him. In Peru, we were a very well-to-do family. Then we (...) came to San Francisco, we had to start from the bottom up. By then he was already pretty old, sixty... well, almost probably seventy, yeah.

TI: Yeah, what a hard life, when you think of him being so successful and then having to have to go through the war and having everything taken away. And then as an older man, trying to start all over, it just seemed so hard.

JN: My father was a very strict person.

TI: Do you think at the end, was he bitter? Was he bitter about his life?

JN: Well, he never showed when we came to San Francisco. He never showed, he'd never bring it out, he'd never talk about the war. But if any of the family did something that he didn't like, my brother would probably tell you, too, but he would slap you. He had all this inside, he wanted to bring out, but not with words, but to teach you, to discipline you to do the right thing. So if he did something wrong, he would tell me, "Look that way." So I would look to my right. And when I looked to my right, he would slap me from that side. He slapped my brother, even my mother, sometimes he was very moody, but later on, he just changed as he gets older and older and older. So at the end he just didn't bring nothing on, not even talk about the war. He never talked with my brothers or sisters, so if they did, they would pass it down to me, didn't know anything about the war. But the hard part for me was coming to San Francisco and going to school, that was the toughest thing for me.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.