<Begin Segment 3>

BF: And you mentioned that your father was actually picked up by the authorities earlier? Did I get that?

CT: On December the 7th he was picked up by the FBI, and you know, talk about being naive, my father spoke English fluently and so we thought, "Gee, they needed him." They needed him to be an interpreter or something, because he had acted as an interpreter in many cases. He had graduated law school, and he was called in as an interpreter in a lot of legal cases, and so yeah, we just thought, "Oh, well, they needed him," and so here actually he was in Multnomah county jail. [Laughs]

BF: Was this something that just the kids thought, or was it something that your mother sort of let you believe, because she wanted to lessen the blow?

CT: Well, I'm not sure where we got that idea. Maybe we both thought that.

BF: Wow. And so how -- at what point did the family come back together?

CT: Well, I left Minidoka in April '43 to go to Denver U. My mother was there alone until next year, 1944, when my father was released from Santa Fe to return to Minidoka. And I thought that he had returned in June of '44, but I just looked it up at the Japanese American National Museum, and he actually returned in April of '44.

BF: Oh. Long separation.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.