<Begin Segment 4>

SY: Now, do you know where your mom was born? Was she born...

NG: No, I don't know where she was born. Here, I don't know. Definitely in the U.S., but I don't know where. They all were born in the U.S.

SY: Right.

NG: She didn't write that about my mom.

SY: She didn't find out when, where all the children were born. When your grandparents, at some point they had to move, right?

NG: Yeah, Masaichi was the one who died at fourteen.

SY: Do you know anything about how, how he died?

NG: No, they don't. They don't really know. Maybe he had leukemia. That was one, one... undiagnosed leukemia, that was one conjecture, but they don't really know.

SY: That must have been hard on your grandmother. Did she talk about that?

NG: Yes. In fact, she wrote about that. She went back to Japan. Evidently she had, like, a nervous breakdown. She took -- it was not a very long, I mean, she, with help she recovered, but she took my mom and Joe and Yoshiko to Japan right after her son died, and then she, I guess, had a nervous breakdown and then went to stay at a, had got treatment and then she came back. I don't know how long a period that was. [Looks at notes] Oh, a month of treatment.

SY: Yeah, it must've been hard. And your father, then, stayed here with the rest of the kids? I mean, grandfather.

NG: Yeah. Right.

SY: Your grandfather stayed here with the rest of the kids.

NG: Yeah, and it's funny because my, the eldest son, Shigeo, always had this tense relationship with his parents. I guess it happened later on, but it probably was from the beginning, but my mom always felt that he maybe felt abandoned because she only took my mom and the other two kids.

SY: The younger ones, probably.

NG: Yeah, and didn't take him. Well, then there was Hatsuno too. She didn't go, but some... who knows where it started.

SY: Right. So he was, if the one who died was fourteen he was probably still in his elder...

NG: He was like sixteen, probably, 'cause they're a couple years apart, all of them.

SY: But she wasn't away too long, and I imagine she went back to live with her parents, huh? When she went back to Japan?

NG: Yes. Yes. In fact, she was going to leave them -- or no, she did leave them, I think. I think she left them there -- and to come back, because it was hard. She thought that, but then they didn't stay. The grandmother, or her mother, called her back. Her mother said they cannot stay here. It, they were so poor that they'll be better off, so they came back real quickly.

SY: Wow.

NG: Yeah, but I guess she wanted, a lot of families did that, where they kept their kids, sent them back to Japan. I guess maybe that was her intention too, but...

SY: Is your, and one of them was your mom. She was...

NG: Right. But it must've been a very short time 'cause she doesn't...

SY: She doesn't remember that.

NG: No.

SY: She didn't talk about that.

NG: No.

SY: So when they, at some point, ended up leaving Moneta...

NG: Yeah, in California. I don't know how long they were there.

SY: You're not quite sure.

NG: No. They went to, okay, in the '30s they went to, moved to El Segundo.

SY: Okay, so that's when they came, basically, to southern California.

NG: Yeah.

SY: And you were born.

NG: Well actually, the only reason I was born in Compton was -- my mom and dad, after they got married they moved up north to Bouldin Island. Remember I was talking about, he was, he was on his own for so long and he knew that area up in northern California? But then when the war broke out and they started to, with the internment, then my aunt and my mom moved back to southern California to be near my, to be near my grandparents so that if they were going to be put into camp they would all go together.

SY: I see.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.