<Begin Segment 5>

FK: Now, now, when you got out of the service, what did you, what did you do?

TO: Well, we went to... we hung around home, 'til met people calling us do some odd jobs in Wing Point, people we knew, and I was wondering what to do. And then, well, I decided to go back to wholesale greenhouse and raise flowers and things.

[Interruption]

FK: So, so when your mom went to camp then, your two, your two younger brothers were still home, though. Is that right?

TO: Well, at that time, yeah. I think they went out earlier, from camp. My second brother, he went to Chicago, and my younger brother went to Oberlin, Ohio, college.

FK: Okay. So you, you went into the greenhouse business. And how long did you stay with that?

TO: Oh, I don't know, twelve, fifteen years or somethin' like that.

FK: Was that in Seattle or was that...

TO: Yeah, Seattle. Yeah, I was a kind of a foreman there. Then I went to Boeing four years, until they shut down the SSD, I was workin' on supersonic. They shut it down and then took a few months off, and then I went to work for City of Seattle in the water department.

FK: Now, so you were actually never in Manzanar or Minidoka, then, except to visit then?

TO: No, not as a resident. [Laughs]

FK: Yeah. So, so did you have any feelings about your, your family having to be there while you were in the service?

TO: No, because back there, we didn't hear hardly very much about the evacuation, you know, among the people. Well, one time they had an orientation there and somebody asked, you know, "What do you think of all the Japanese being evacuated from West Coast?" And the instructor said, "Well, if somebody murders somebody in a hotel, you gotta arrest the whole people in the whole, whole hotel." It didn't make sense to me, but they didn't think much about the, you know, evacuation. There wasn't much in the news there.

FK: Now, so when did you come back to the island right after the...

TO: Yeah, it was 19'... I got discharged in November of '45, and I went to Chicago and L.A. on the way home. Then I stayed there, at home, a short time, helped my brother fix up the home. And then decided to work for some... went back to greenhouse.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.