<Begin Segment 21>

LH: So how did your family, your mom and dad, resume life back to normal?

MN: I think it was terribly difficult. I know that my dad scrambled around trying to look for a job for quite a while. And the first job that he was offered, for sure, was a -- what do you call? Orderly at Providence Hospital, and a couple of his friends came by and said an orderly is a person who takes care of the urine. You cannot be an orderly. You're a community leader. You're a person of prestige and can't lower yourself to be an orderly, and my father says he has to feed his family and that's the first job that's offered him so he was going to accept it. And apparently a couple of the people got together and said that this cannot be, and they pooled their money together and helped him come up with a grocery store, and that's the first. So he did not take the job as a orderly. I remember some conversations between the adults saying that you have to say you're Chinese to get a job. You can't get a job if you admit that you're Japanese. The kids at school used to tease you, "Are you Japanese?" I have to surmise what all that meant in societal terms, but if you're a man who has a pretty good job and comes back -- my dad said he had $4,000 in the bank before he left for camp, and when he came back he says it had dwindled down to $200. That's what he had out of $4,000. Must have been quite a nest egg in those days, but it was down to $200. He said he was never given any money to leave camp. He said other people were given money to leave camp, at least to travel back home. He said he wasn't. I don't know how he missed out on it. And God, when you have no more means of supporting your family, you got four little kids, I mean, that has to be hard, really hard. And it sounded like my father's friends are the ones who encouraged him not to take the job of orderly, but what does my father have to go through to be considered a good looking, prestigious, well-liked person to kind of give up some of that role and accept a job as a orderly? I don't know what that means to him. I think he was willing. He thought his family was worth it.

LH: So in the meantime, what happened to your family, your mom and the four of you girls?

MN: My mom was going to go back and try to reestablish and see if she could be a barber again. So I remember we bought a barber chair and we were kind of concerned. I remember there was some conversation about mom only cut Japanese hair. Can she cut white hair and black hair? And then there was a matter of black hair is very different from Japanese hair, and there was some conversation along that line. I was wondering how different is black hair from our hair? I didn't know any different, but she never did pursue that. We bought this chair and we had a lot of fun playing in the chair I remember, [Laughs] but she never really went back and picked that up. And then meanwhile dad left the grocery business and went into a pool hall, started a pool hall business.

LH: That's quite a departure.

MN: Yeah. A pool hall business in the I.D. and as they were painting up this pool hall, I thought a pool hall was a swimming pool and I could not imagine how they were going to put a swimming pool in this little part. And I found out that pool hall meant something quite different than what I had imagined. And my father was probably a very good foreman. He probably was. Well, he was not a good business person. He just was not tenacious enough to stay with a job. So he went from the pool hall. He got into the business of salmon again, some kind of a middle man for salmon. He started a Japanese movie business, kind of as a side line at the beginning. He started the moyashi, the bean sprout business. He got into a whole heck of a lot of things. Toward the end the mainstay business was a Japanese movie business, but he never made money. He exploited the rest of us kids. We helped him with every business he had. He got free labor out of us and he still couldn't make any money. [Laughs] He just kind of subsisted, but the movie business kind of gave him identity anyway. So he used to take the Japanese movies and go to the Hirabayashi Nursing Home and show movies to the old folks there. He used to say that he couldn't do anything for his mother so he's doing something for the old folks. After the war we got a telegram that his mother died. That was really sad because when our other grandma died or any time we had a loss, we all kind of grieved together. When my father lost his mother, none of us knew her, not even my mom 'cause she's never been to Japan, so, and he had never been able to go back to Japan to meet her again. And I kind of suspect that my father was one of her favorite sons, and we all wanted to grieve with him. We felt so sad for him, but we couldn't do what we usually do, you know, tell stories to each other about what a wonderful person they were or anything like that. I says my poor father had to grieve all by himself. That made me real sad that we could not share his grief with him. That was hard for him.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.