Densho Digital Archive - Chiyoko Yano Interview (denshovh-ychiyoko

<Begin Segment 7>

MA: So in February of 1942, you know, the Executive Order 9066 was issued, and they started posting notices that the Japanese Americans were going to be removed to the camps. And what was your reaction about this and about leaving your home and going away?

CY: Well, for some, we were fortunate, we had very nice neighbors. There was a black family living next door, and a black family living diagonally across the street from us, and then there was an Irish family, but they were all very sympathetic toward the fact that we had to do what we had to do. And so they tried to help us, you know, get ready to move. And my, the house that we lived in, we were renting it from an Italian family, and they felt sorry for us, too. They didn't have to move, but we had to move. And so they said that if, if my father wanted to, he could buy the house. It was a very nominal fee, you couldn't buy a house like that anymore, you can't even buy a car at that price. But, so my father agreed to buy it and leave everything there. We didn't have to store anything, we just left the house, it was like going away temporarily. And then my neighbor next door was a black man, and he said, well, he could keep an eye on it. But, and then... I don't know how we found him, but we found a boxer. At that time he was kind of a well-known, young boxer, he was a very young boxer, but he, his name was in the newspapers winning this and that, and he wanted to rent the place. So they rented it to him, I don't know how he came into the picture, it might have been my next-door neighbor who told him. And then I understand that during the war there was about thirty people living in my house. And because they all went to work for the shipyards, and so they would live eight hours one, or ten hours one time, and then another ten hours would be occupied by somebody else. And altogether about thirty people lived. And then we had, they had the run of our house, and we told them they could use all the furniture and things, but certain things, my mother and my father put into a box and we had a little room about the fourth of this size inside the house where, off the bathroom, that used to be like a storage room. And so we stored some of the things that we didn't want them to use in there, but we noticed when we came back that that room was disturbed. We don't know who disturbed it, but it was disturbed. But that was the only... and so we came back and we had, the furniture and everything was all, not in good condition and things, but still, that was more or less expected because we were gone for three and a half, four years.

MA: That's great, though, that this Italian family sold the house to you.

CY: So we came back to our house. And then we had no trouble asking them to move out. You know, some families, they became squatters, so we had the house all ready to move in when we came back August 15th.

MA: So it sounds like you had some very supportive people in the neighborhood watching over you.

CY: That was all because the neighbors were watching. And I remember when we went to Tanforan, my neighbor, Mr. and Mrs. Howard came to visit us in camp, and they bought us a few fruits and things. And so we had very nice neighbors.