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HM: What did you finally do after the war?

IW: Pardon me?

HM: What did you do after the war?

IW: Well, see, I was settled in Chicago already and I had a job with the Travelers Aid which I liked. And they thought that I should go on to school, and that's my first intention. But you know, when you're starting a job, and you have to think of yourself, your feeling, and no one is paying your bills and all, so I did go to the lawyer family. Oh, first of all, I got to tell you, when we were in the hostel, we met some of the girls my age, and we thought we would try to get an apartment, so we trudged everywhere they have open. They just, "Oh, we just, someone just bought it, so we have no vacancy." So we knew why, and many of the people would say, "Oh, gee, you girls seem like nice girls, and I'd love to have you, but," it's always "but," "the others might care, and they might run out on us." And so we knew what. But the third day, lucky day, we found one that said, "Oh, we'd love to have you girls," and we thought, oh, hooray, so we picked it without really certain. Well, it had a place to cook and they had two other bedrooms or something like that, and so we took it. And when we stayed there one day when the Elevated was running, and when you stood there, we saw that, when we were taking off our clothes at night, the Elevated comes, and the blind, blind goes zoomed up, and we knew were welcome to this place. We thought, "Oh, we can't live like that," where the window is open and just, every time the Elevated comes in, we're in the, seeing it. So we went and asked for our money back, that we couldn't stay there.

Anyway, and the awfulest part was when I was being interviewed for a job in the Army Engineers, this was a government job, and when I went there, the FBI interrogated me by the hour. And they said, "You didn't tell me that you went to Japan in 1929." "Well, you didn't ask me in the first place, and yes, I have... well, I was six years old." They really give you the one, the kind one, and the other one is a mean one. And then another thing they said, "Well, you didn't say you were in an apartment," and I don't know what. It just came to me that, "I don't have to tell you that because I didn't live there for six months." And I said, "Well, I only tried three days, we got it, one day. So three days, I don't think it counts as your residence." I don't know what made me say that, but that was the right answer. And they said, and then, what do you know? I leave my address book. The first name on there is Amatatsu, that's my maiden name. And my father has where he's interned. [Laughs] So I thought, "Oh, my gosh, I left my..." but they sent it to me right away. And when the Freedom of Information Act came in, I did send for my, what they had about me. Mine was pretty big. I tried my husband's, too, and his was more, smaller. But they had everything in there. But they knew me more than I knew myself. [Laughs]

HM: Okay. How did the war and relocation change your life?

IW: It made me grow up a lot faster. I had to make decisions for myself, and I made good decisions. I was always the Sunday school help, to make your choices. When I worked for the government, every lunchtime, when certain people are leaving, we have our little luncheon place, ladies would all go out and they spend more than their allotted forty-five minutes to an hour and they would drink in the middle of the luncheon. And I wasn't a drinker, so I didn't drink, and one day they were saying, "Oh, don't you start drinking because we depend on you." Because I had to tell them, "We got to go back." Well, there's no more of those lunches. Because even if I wasn't drinking, I'd tell 'em, "Let's go back, it's way past our time to..." so that was another area, so it made me more of a... well, a leader, say. I wasn't into all those things, so I think it helped.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.