<Begin Segment 13>

KL: So you were there for three years, and then did you... I'm trying to do math, which is always a bad idea. You came back to Portland from the camp?

JM: Uh-huh, 1945. Dad left about three months early, and evidently he was able to arrange to get this lease on this hotel, which is at 1405 Southwest First, but it's First and Columbia. And it used to belong to the Hongos before the war, and it had a storefront down below. But he came back to get us, and he brought my sister and I these nice herringbone tweed aqua coats with matching hats. So we came home in style. I don't know how we got home, or got back to the hotel, but we did. And years later, I'm looking at pictures from Japan, and there are my cousins' wives, or are they my cousins? Anyway, there's a whole bunch of Matsumoto family in the pictures, and there's two of 'em, young women wearing our coats. So we must have worn 'em out pretty much and then sent them to Japan, and they were so grateful. And so I remember that.

KL: Did your parents write letters with their family in Japan? Were they in touch?

JM: I think they did, but I don't know. My friend Etsu Osaki, her father was the Buddhist minister in Seattle, and he wrote English. And he used to send letters to the family from wherever the camp that he went to right after, when the FBI took him. And his letters were where they crossed off...

KL: Censored.

JM: Censored, yeah. And they still have those letters, I saw them.

KL: Did any of the teachers from your elementary school in Portland write to you? You said they came to the assembly center, but...

JM: I think some people did if they were older. I (think) Sato Hashizume may have had somebody, because she wrote a lot about coming home and the things that she remembered. She's maybe three or four years older than me. And my friend Etsu's older brother, I think, Sat Ichikawa, wrote this book for middle school kids, and when I read that, it reminds me more of the camp that I remember. But he has to be about four or five years older than me, and it's a... he did it for the vets up in Seattle. And so the Nisei Vets of Seattle are getting the benefit of the sale of these books. And I bought one to give to my grandnephew, because it really tells the story as close to how I remember camp. It's a wonderful little book. He wrote two, and I think the other one's about Crystal City, and that's on sale at Legacy Center, but I don't know why the first one on Minidoka isn't on sale there.

KL: You said you don't have a lot of memories of the trip back, but do you remember being back in Portland again? What did you think, were things familiar?

JM: Not really. My friends all... I didn't play so much, when I lived on First and Pine, I played mostly with people who lived over towards Burnside. And then after we were down southwest, closer to Market, so then I played with my friends who went to Shattuck grade school. And that's when I remember walking to the hotels that they lived at.

KL: And Shattuck elementary, it was Shattuck elementary, right? And you said that was ethnically more diverse, obviously, because you had been with all Japanese Americans before?

JM: Yeah. There weren't very many black people until after the Vanport Flood, and then they bussed people who lived in North Portland to Lincoln, and it became very, that was about the same time that we came back, or that I was in high school, which would have been at least three or four years after. I can't remember exactly when that Vanport Flood was, but that's when... and the clubs at Lincoln were people lived in Lake Oswego, came to Lincoln, and the clubs were, had black members and Japanese Americans.

KL: So that was the other large group of people? It became then a mostly black and Japanese American schools?

JM: Yeah, there was an, much more mixture after they did bus these, the black people who lived in Vanport.

KL: And you had your blond friend from Indianapolis?

JM: Yes, and I had my blond friend who, when we graduated, she was, I think she was 5'10", and I'm still 4'10". [Laughs] I used to be 4'11", but I'm now 4'10".

KL: What were relations like between the groups? Was everybody pretty much an individual?

JM: Very... we mingled pretty well and pretty easily, except I think I was, like, shyer. Because somebody at the 50th reunion says, "I don't remember you ever speaking up." [Laughs] I said, "I didn't."

KL: I didn't either, for sure.

JM: So, "What happened to you?" and I think I said, "I think I grew up." [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.