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BN: So anyway, okay. So your dad is now, has resettled in Chicago. What was he doing as an occupation in Chicago that brought him out there?

NN: He, as far as I know, that he was employed for a... I wouldn't call it a tool designing office or factory or whatever, and I've seen like, he bought one of those, what is it, like an 8-mm camera for use in Chicago, so he was taking pictures of his work and friend, people that he knew. And there were a lot of Niseis working there at this shop. And I remember that as a kid, I used to see like a set of books, and it was all, like, volume one, volume two, all the way to maybe volume twenty, and they were like paperback books with instructive kind of stuff. He learned, he was self-taught to be like a draftsman, a tool designer draftsman, so I think that was like if you had to give a title to what he did, eventually he became like a draftsman.

BN: Okay. And then you were mentioning that he met your mom there, but to back up, can you now talk about your mom and how she ended up in Chicago?

NN: Okay. My mother's father was...

BN: And then what her name was.

NN: Oh, it was Yoshiye Nagatani, and she christened, she gave herself the name Diane when she had to leave camp and go to Chicago, you know, to have an Anglicized name.

BN: And then Nagatani was her married name.

NN: Oh, I'm sorry, it was Yoshimura.

BN: Yoshimura.

NN: And I guess her friends called her "Yo-Yo," I think. She was raised by her father, Kichigaro, and she had two brothers, she was the youngest, and they were uncle Jimmy and uncle Joe. And the family resided in Boyle Heights, California, my mother was a graduate from Roosevelt High School. She was talented and liked the theater, she won some type of, like, Shakespeare contest in high school that she was actually on the radio for this, I guess it was a citywide contest and she won the contest. She was offered a scholarship, I think, to UCLA. At the time that her, my grandfather, he didn't want her to go. And I guess if anyone should have gone to college, it should have been like the older brother, my uncle Jimmy. So what can you say, like my mom just kind of went along with it, but...

BN: But the implication being because she was a girl.

NN: Yes. And I guess not the oldest or whatever. Her upbringing was, it was rough in a way where she was raised without a mom. And I guess having two brothers that were pretty much protective of her, that she would remember incidents where things like, she would wear a nice dress to school, and I guess some of her friends would go home and tell, "Oh, Yoshiye came, she looked real pretty today, she had a nice dress on." And I guess the response would be, "Well, that's because she don't have a mother." So little things like little digs here and there. My jiichan was, I never really had a relationship with him, because after the war, he went to Japan to reside, I met him a couple times. But my understanding was he was very old school, pro-Japanese, in fact, I think he may have been a member of one of those Dragon Societies in Manzanar, and he would be the kind of man that, say, at a New Year's party or wedding when they give the open mic, he'd be up there singing. And I probably, like he didn't take too much caca. So I guess my mom shared a story with me that when she was a kid, that I guess one of the neighbors had a car, and they would get all the neighborhood kids, pick 'em up and take 'em to the beach. I don't know how my mom, old she was, I would imagine like grade school or whatever. So she's waiting to get picked up, and she has her swimsuit on and her towel, beach towel. And she was waiting, waiting, waiting, and no one came. When her dad came home, when jiichan came home, he thought she was going to the beach, and my mom just saying, "Well, no one came to pick me up." So he got so angry that he went out and got a car to take them to the beach, kind of thing. He was a veteran of the Japan-Russian War, and he was a part of a veterans group that I guess would get together and reminisce and celebrate in Little Tokyo, which was probably the reason why, on December 8th, he was identified and sent to New Mexico in a prison.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.