<Begin Segment 19>

MA: And you said you stayed in Denver until 1946.

NI: '46.

MA: And why did you decide to leave? Did you always think that you would go back to Watsonville? Was that always the plan?

NI: Yeah, that was it. And then all the camp people were going home, they had to get out, either go east or come home or wherever. And so, and then we had his mother, so she probably wanted to come home, too. So Charlie, Charlie came by himself once on the train, stayed at a hostel in San Francisco, he said, and came to Watsonville. He said (he) looked, people looked pretty good, they're all working, got some kind of a job. We decided, he decided, "Well, we better go home," so we came back.

MA: How did people in town treat the Japanese Americans who were coming back to Watsonville? Was there ill feeling?

NI: Well, it depends on, I guess, I never had that, where people said, "Why'd you come back?" or, "Get out of my store," anything like that. Because I try not to be offensive or talk back or anything when they do say things like that. We were working most of the time. They needed labor, and so we did hard labor. Never worked so hard in my life.

MA: What did you do?

NI: We worked in the fields again. It was harder than berries. But we picked strawberries, too.

MA: What was the other, what was the other crops that you were working with?

NI: Oh, there were, there was lettuce, and I worked in the apple drier in the winter when the apples came. So we had to do something, we had to make a living. And we were not afraid of working. I guess my generation had to.

MA: And when you came back to Watsonville, where did you and Charlie, did you go back to your house that you had bought?

NI: Uh-huh, yeah, we went back to our house, came back to our house. A small home but it was still our home.

MA: And it was in good condition still? It was in okay...

NI: It was in fairly good condition. We had to fix afterwards, you know, but it was all right. It was better than camp homes.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Watsonville - Santa Cruz JACL. All Rights Reserved.