<Begin Segment 20>

LH: When you returned to Seattle, what did you make of it? You were how old? Eight years old or so?

MN: Yeah. I was about that age, yeah.

LH: Okay, if you are eight years old and you're coming back to Seattle, did you return to your former home?

MN: No. No. We were renting our home so there was no home to come back to.

LH: Oh, where did you go?

MN: There was a family who had a room in an apartment building, I think, that they owned and they let us move in with them in their unit. And they had three kids and we had four so it was obvious that we were an imposition and they were pretty well to do. They sure looked like they were fabulously rich from my perspective. They had a piano, a private piano. Wow. We stayed with them for a while, but it was kind of obvious they were scrambling around trying to find a place to live, and they finally had a little house right there in the Central area that a Japanese man owned and we rented out the house.

LH: And what happened to the belongings that, any belongings that you had before the war?

MN: I don't know. I suspect... I don't remember much of any goods in the way of materials that survived. We didn't have much of old things. We have albums of pictures of my sisters when they were kids. That, we have and that had to be old, but nothing much else other than that that I remember from before camp days so I figure we must have lost it. I don't know how we lost it or where we lost it, but I don't remember recovering anything, though.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.