<Begin Segment 16>

TL: You talked about how things were difficult during the war, and I'm wondering, were you rationed in terms of the food, or how did you guys get along?

HN: They rationed the rice and things like that, but we were living in the country with my father's, his oldest sister's daughter, well, she was more like an aunt to us. And she had a farm, so she gave us rice and vegetables and eggs from her -- she had quite a few chicken there. So we were lucky that she helped us out. But otherwise, the people that lived in town, they, no one had all rice. It was all mixed with soybeans or with wheat or barley. So lot of people used to come out to the country to see if they could buy rice. But we -- they did a hardship over there. They were running out of paper, so a lot of times they didn't have toilet paper. So we kind of had to use paper from the, oh, that rice paper that we used to write on. We used to save those and use that as toilet paper. Yeah. It was, it was pretty bad in Japan when the war was ending, then after the war.

TL: You mentioned something about remembering that at one point you were eating dandelions?

HN: Oh, yeah. We had to eat dandelion and, see, all kind of, not grass, but like we, we had our own little vegetable garden.

TL: This is on the farm or --

HN: Yeah. When we were living with my aunt. The sweet potato, I think there's one part you could eat, and we used to eat that. Any kind of grass or whatever; if it was edible we used to eat. We used to eat a lot of soybeans and seaweed and things like that. And dried fish, that little, they call it iriko. They use it to make the soup stock. We used to eat that too. Just kind of mix it with that miso, that soybean paste. And we'd eat, oh, even when we were in school they made us catch these grasshoppers. And then they would dry that grasshopper, and they ground it up like a powder. And then we would eat that.

TL: Would you eat it sprinkled on...

HN: Rice.

TL: ...rice or something?

HN: Yeah, so Japan was getting desperate.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.