<Begin Segment 14>

AI: Okay, Dave, we're going to move now into the resettlement era. And this puts you at about thirty-two years to adult. Okay? When did you leave Topaz?

DT: We left Topaz in 1945, I remember. Yeah, 1945, and we went to San Francisco. By the way, we did not go with a group; we went just as a family. I had a special permit to go back to California. I wrote to the commanding general and I said, "Here we are, we have done nothing wrong, we've been in the desert for three years, and it's silly for us to stay in camp." And by golly, the army answered in saying, "We're gonna let you go home." Well, right after they said that, they opened the coast to the Japanese Americans anyway.

AI: Oh, so you went back a little earlier than some of the others?

DT: Not necessarily earlier, but by the time I got the permission to go, they said that California was going to be, people were gonna go back to California anyway. [Laughs]

AI: And so you resettled in San Francisco where you...

DT: Well, we went, we went to our home. You know, we had our home there.

AI: Right. Back home.

DT: And we were very fortunate. Many of the people, they didn't know what to do. They go out of camp with twenty-five dollars, and what do they do? I ran a hostel at the Church of Christ for people to stay and all that. And, and in fact, what I did was after I got back to San Francisco, I helped resettlement for a year-and-a-half, under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church and the Reform Church, and I helped people try to get jobs, find places to stay. And then I spoke at the University of California Berkeley, I spoke at San Francisco State College. I was, I was, kept busy. I have a list of (...) hundreds of things I did during that time.

AI: I'm going to back up just tiny bit. You traveled back home to San Francisco how?

DT: By train.

AI: Okay. Was this ride any different from the train ride going to camp?

DT: Oh, it was different because we were just our family only, going back, not as a group. And let's see... my father and Alice, and three children. So we had our own little compartment, and we went back that way.

[Interruption]

AI: So upon disembarking from the train, what were your thoughts and feelings about coming home?

DT: Well, I think I wrote about that period, the feeling of coming home. It was naturally quite a emotional feeling, after being in the desert for three years, and then to come back, to see San Francisco, for example, on the ferryboat crossing the bay. And then there's a, in my private movie, there's a shot of our family entering our home on 1625 Buchanan Street, my father, too, and that's not in the movie that I show of Topaz to other people. It's the private one that I kept aside. It was too, too personal. But there's a shot of my dad and us going into the home on Buchanan Street.

AI: So it sounds like you've documented quite a bit of your experiences. You mentioned the movie, and you also mentioned that you wrote about coming home. Did you keep a journal or some kind of a account?

DT: I have it someplace, things I wrote. Not exactly a journal, but some of the thoughts that I had at that time. In fact, I wrote -- just before we were evacuated, I wrote a piece, and it's someplace around there. It might be in that box of evacuation material.

AI: So those have been for your own personal use, or have they been published?

DT: They haven't been published, no.

AI: Anything else that you wrote about that's a big part of your experience?

DT: Well, we, as I said, my experience was unique in the sense that I traveled twenty thousand miles on the United States buying for the co-op store. How many people had the opportunity to be running around the United States during wartime? And talk about unique experience, one night I was on a train going to New York for the first time. And I was, of all things, I was sitting next to a beautiful blonde, and she was a lovely person from Iowa. And she was going to New York to meet her husband at the merchant marine. And so we had, both of us sleeping together. I don't know if we had one cover or not. And two sailors were just returning from the Battle of Tarawa Island -- it was very bloody -- came, and she was very pretty. So they sat in front of us and turned around and started talking to her. Then they said, "Oh, here's a Jap flag that we got during the invasion of Tarawa, and here's a picture of a dead Jap soldier." He shows it to me, too, you know. And they didn't realize that I was Japanese American. So it was a very unique experience. That happened on that train.

AI: Okay.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.