<Begin Segment 11>

SY: And then do you remember why your father decided to come back to Los Angeles?

RN: Well, he didn't want to stay... yeah, he just wanted to go back to Los Angeles and I don't think he wanted to stay in Denver. Although I'm sure his brother would have kept him on there, but he just wanted to come back to L.A. And the only thing he could do was gardening, so we came, he bought a small Ford coupe -- you know what a coupe is, it's a two-seater, I mean, with a small back -- and we drove across from Denver to L.A. And then he took the same coupe, he cut out the back of the car and made a, kind of a wooden, like a pickup truck except it was smaller. He bought some equipment and just started out.

SY: Doing the same thing. And he, I assume, was leasing the house that you lived in before the war.

RN: Yeah, yeah. In fact, that was probably one of the reasons why we had moved there, was a good friend from Kagoshima had moved out there, and he owned a, I guess he did well whatever he was doing. So he had a couple, three houses there. In fact, I think all the Japanese families, the three other families were living in Mr. Kagematsu's houses. So we went back there. And although we didn't rent the big house, we rented the small house in the back.

SY: And this, again, so when you came back, it was that area, that same kind of Los Feliz...

RN: Yeah. In Atwater.

SY: Atwater.

RN: It was the same, exactly the same place, except we moved into the house in the back, small house.

SY: And your father then sort of took up almost immediately with the gardening?

RN: Yeah.

SY: And had this thing. He was very handy, though.

RN: Yeah, he made a little pickup truck out of his car.

SY: And did he take up at the same judo...

RN: No, he just didn't... he only started back a little bit when I was older. I started judo when I was like... well, actually, pretty much after we came back when I was eight or nine. So he kind of just took me and worked out with me, but he didn't, he was never seriously involved with it since the war.

SY: Did your parents encourage you to do, like, the Japanese sports?

RN: Yeah. In camp they did, there was so much I did... oh, boy. Well, I did calligraphy, they had calligraphy classes. And there was a Japanese... I guess there were like, it's a dance, but it's all done with swords and whatnot, so I did that. I hated it, but my dad made me do that.

SY: Encouraged you. But not judo in camp?

RN: Not in camp. My dad was very active in judo in Manzanar, too, I forgot to mention that. But for whatever reason... oh, I think one good reason is that the dojo was way on the other side of camp, and we were on Block 36, was the extreme north, and then the dojo was built, and that's on the other side. That was a very good reason, 'cause I'd have to walk.

SY: I think people don't realize the distances between going from one place in camp.

RN: Right, so that'd be a long, long walk.

SY: We're going to go back to camp for a second. Did the weather bother you? Do you remember the weather being...

RN: Only the windstorms, because that, if you're caught out in it, it really stings and you had to cover your head and all of that. And the cold. The heat didn't bother me, the cold did, waiting for dinner, get in the mess hall early in the morning. But otherwise it wasn't... I think Manzanar was kind of high desert, so it was moderate compared to Heart Mountain or a lot of other places.

SY: You don't remember them doing anything special to guard against certain weather conditions?

RN: No, other than patching up cracks in the tarpaper and things like that. It snowed there about one winter, anyway.

SY: So, really, in camp, you had no other relatives except for your immediate...

RN: Oh, no, I had some of my mother's cousins, two cousins had their families, so we saw a lot of them, and there were some Kagoshima people which were kind of like relatives. They didn't have a lot of relatives there, but they had some.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.