Densho Digital Archive - Mas Hashimoto Interview (denshovh-hmas-01-0025)

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TI: Well, eventually, you go back to Watsonville. So how did your family go back to Watsonville? Did you go individually or with a group?

MH: We came back in August of 1945. And weeds had grown all over the, the yard. I mean, it's a miracle nobody put a match to it, the whole place would have gone up in smoke. There was a hobo living, not in the house, but in the backseat of the car that we had jacked up on blocks, and he was living there. And when we came back, he took off, he left everything there, he took off. And we lived close to the hobo camps near the river, and so we tried to find him to thank him for looking out after -- he was a caretaker. He may not have known it, but he was a caretaker. And we wanted to thank him, but we never could find him. And so anyway...

TI: But based on what you saw, how long do you think he was staying there?

MH: Probably as soon as we left. But we're so grateful to him, and we have absolutely no idea who he was. So we cleaned up the place, and one of the things, remember we had the restaurant? I remember a gentleman, a Nihonjin from L.A., who came. And I didn't know this, that we had dishes in the attic, and he bought all of our dishes. They were old dishes, but they were Japanese dishes, and that money helped, helped pay for a lot of our expenses. And so there was a restaurant down in L.A. that had some Japanese dishes.

TI: So, but you were one of the lucky ones, because you had a place to come back to.

MH: We had a place to come back to. A lot of people went to Seabrook Farms, who had no place to go. And Seabrook offered, it was a company town, wages weren't very good and such, but wages weren't very good anywhere. We were lucky. And then next door, the temple became a hostel, so people... you know, you could take only what you could carry when you go into camp, basically the same thing is true when you come out of camp. Only what you can carry. And a lot of treasures were left behind in Poston, in all these camps. We're trying to find these artifacts now. The Art of Gaman is a big start of, "Wow, there's a lot of treasure hidden in a lot of garages and such, we need to find them and bring them out."

TI: When you said things were left back at Poston, what would, what would be examples of things that had to be left back because people couldn't carry?

MH: I left my stool, you know, the one that became a part of me, I left that. I'm sure my mom could, left all kinds of stuff that she would have liked to have brought with her. But we only had two suitcases.