<Begin Segment 42>

DG: Well, one of the comments that you make is that as you were helping people relocated, there was a saturation point for some cities that you didn't want too many to go to one place. Why was that?

NS: Well, because there were too many Japanese for the size of the town.

DG: And why is that bad?

NS: Because there were no jobs available. Unless there were jobs available -- I mean, there is a saturation point as far as jobs were concerned with the number of people in that particular locality. And if you inundate that with extra Japanese, you have more prejudice coming against the people taking over some of the jobs that the white people feel that should be theirs. That was the reasoning, I think, behind that statement. I wrote a lot of things. [Laughs]

DG: You constantly talk about everybody leaving and you said, "It's becoming an old people's home."

NS: [Laughs] It was, because it was just the elderly who couldn't do anything that stayed behind and the government took care of them.

DG: And that was kind of becoming a welfare state.

NS: Yes. And they probably would, and they probably -- and it seemed that people who didn't need to be old, became old. A lot of the people who were halfway there became dependent when they didn't need to be. Their whole outlook seemed to be more defeatist than optimistic and it wasn't doing anything good to people being in a camp like that.

DG: It seems like the YWCA understood this.

NS: Yes.

DG: Because they said that everything was geared toward resettlement in their publications.

NS: Uh-huh.

DG: Is that right?

NS: I guess so. Anyway, I felt that it was a forward-going organization that I had been interested in and took interest in.

<End Segment 42> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.