<Begin Segment 9>

CO: So how did you re-adjust to life back in the communities?

MK: Oh, back in the community? When we came back, naturally, we were in the same position as everybody else. We had no place to go and when I came back, most of the people in our community were living in a, a lot of them were living in the Mountain View Japanese School, that was used more or less like a hostel. And I think it was, I give, I give those people a lot of credit. They, they endured a lot of injustice and hardships and in their own little way they achieved some kind of success. The Japanese Americans in the Mountain View/Sunnyvale area really worked hard. I think that was true of all the Japanese Americans that came back. And with the help of their Issei parents, tried their best to re-establish themselves in the community.

We took any kind of job that was available. Picking fruits, working in the fields, nobody offered us a office job, 9 to 5 with high pay. They just give us... they didn't give us anything. In fact, we had to scratch for everything we, we got. So when the Japanese American leaders take, say that we were responsible for success, that's not true. Success came from the Japanese Americans and their Issei parents coming back and scraping their life together and working very hard, most of 'em worked seven days a week. If anybody's going to pat anybody's back, they should pat their own backs. They really did it the hard way.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.