<Begin Segment 17>

TL: How did you feel, since you still strongly identified with America, how did you feel with the end of the war and Japan having to surrender?

HN: Well, I was happy that America won 'cause our heart was still in America. And, well, my friends, I even told my friends that I'm going to go back to America. Even when we were, during the war I used to tell them that. And lot of them kind of wanted to go back to America, too, the ones that lived in Japan all the time. They always, they said they always wanted to go to America and visit, or even go and live there. So I guess most of the kids had dreams of going to America.

TL: And what did they think was in store for them, or what did they, how did they have such a positive impression of America?

HN: The kids in Japan? Well, must be, they used to read the magazines and things probably. And they might have seen some of the movies long time ago about America and things like that.

TL: And then they saw your player piano. [Laughs]

HN: And the piano and stuff.

TL: In America, Japanese had their loyalty questioned. When you were in Japan, did you ever feel that you or your sister's loyalty was questioned?

HN: No. We didn't have anyone come to ask us anything, I guess because we were still going to high school. We were young.

TL: How about, not so much official questioning, but just the way other people treated you, maybe your friends' parents or somebody like that?

HN: No, I didn't feel that we were treated differently.

TL: So at the, in 1945, when the war ended, people seemed to accept you as Japanese --

HN: Japanese.

TL: -- even though they might know that you were really born in America.

HN: In America.

TL: They just accepted you for who you were?

HN: Uh-huh. Well, maybe it was our town. Maybe the people were nicer because maybe some other part of Japan they could have been different.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.