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DG: I even heard stories of several, like maybe the Takemoto family and my family, the Kitamoto families sending a family representative, probably the head of the household, to come back earlier to check out the climate of the island before they brought the family back. Did your father share any stories of that?

MW: No, they weren't... the way that they described it was there was no, there was no brass band when they returned and there were no barn burnings, they just came back. So he wasn't really involved in that. They reported when people returned, I mean, there was a story about the Takemotos coming. And when your grandfather came, Yuki Omoto came with him, and she was very anxious to talk to the Kay family who had been so kind to them and taking care of their property and other things, so she was glad to have had that chance to have had that chance to come in the spring, I think, and then return in the summer, I'm not sure. But yeah, no, people just kind of came back. Of course, there were people who... by the end of the Depression, many of the families who had been struggling now since maybe the early '20s to establish a farm and had gotten a lot of help from people like the Loverages and the Andersons who had extended them credit so they could buy food for their families, groceries. And they finally, I talked to so many people who, "Yeah, we had money in the bank for the first time. We built a house, we finally built a house." So there were several, many families who had been able to take the next step up from the little shack they were living in to a comfortable home, and some of the amenities that people like, had enough so that they had a stake in the land. Either they had made arrangements to buy land in their sons' names, now they were eighteen, or other islanders had helped them purchase, and would eventually sell to them for a dollar or whatever. There were arrangements like that that many families had, but there also were families who had not quite gotten to that point. They still were sort of tenant farmers. They hadn't gotten, they were almost there, but they hadn't, and the war came, and they had nothing. They were like most of the others, most of the other 120,000 who were in camps who didn't have anything to return to.

One of the great tragedies of this is that when the war ended, people were handed twenty-five dollars, which is the same they give to released criminals, and said, "Okay, go home. And most of the people had no homes to go home to. They had nothing. Maybe they had children who could then take them in, but they had nothing of their own. And there were some families on the island that that happened to. There were some who chose, like the large Sakuma family on the island decided, "No, we're gonna leave this rotten farming, rocky, hilly land and go to Burlington where it's great soil." So there were some families who purposely didn't come back because they found a better opportunity, and there were many who had established themselves in Chicago and Milwaukee and chose to do that, but there also were people who just had nothing to return to here, wanted to be in the area, found a job in a gas station in Seattle or whatever. So not everyone who wanted to come back could.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.