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KL: What was your, did your family have an apartment, then, within the hotel?

JM: Yes. So that way we had a place to stay, and by taking care of... I think they, my father got paid a little bit of money for collecting the rent every month. I don't know how they heated those apartments before the war, but after the war, he came back and was able to find another apartment to lease again, and we lived there for ten years. But I knew with that one, we used to stack the wood down in the room in the basement of the hotel, which was the first floor, and he used to put it in sacks and carry it up to the room, so the rooms were heated with wood stoves in each room. And fortunately, nobody set anything on fire, which was good. And then he used to send the laundry out each week, and they used to, Mom and Dad used to make the beds, and I had to do that one year when Mom and Alice went berry picking one summer, and so Alice was in high school, she went berry picking with my mother, and I was still in high school. So I stayed home with Dad. And I don't remember vacuum cleaners, I just remember what we called hokeys to clean the hallways. I learned about bedbugs, because Dad used to have this thing you had to spray, and I used to have to hold open the mattresses when we changed the sheets. We never had bedbugs in our apartment, but in some of those apartments there would be bedbugs.

KL: Do you know who owned the hotel?

JM: No, never knew who owned it. But in return for taking care of the hotel, changing the lightbulbs and all that, he got paid a little. And Ted Hachiya, who was older than twenty-one, when we came back, or even before, they may have bought, he may have bought that hotel in his name. It's on Front and Columbia. And so after the war, he's the one that told me that there was this hotel organization like a club of hotel owners, and those that had, were able to collect money, like Mr. Ebihara had a hotel on about third and Madison, and he had someone that his daughter and I called Goofy Gus. Goofy Gus took over the management of the hotel while the Ebiharas went to camp, and he collected the rent and put the money away for them somehow. And so there might have been a few others that had that kind of thing. So there were some people who had money, and they could loan money to people who wanted to buy hotels after the war but didn't have any savings. And he told me that... well, he always told me my dad was part of that group, and also part of the, what they called the Japanese Ancestral Society now, it was called Nikkeijinkai back then. That whenever he saw my dad, my dad was very conservative. He always was, you don't buy anything unless you have money in the bank, and so Ted said my father was that kind of a guy. And then, but he said he did the taxes for the managers.

KL: That your father did the taxes?

JM: No, that Ted did the taxes. And he said most of them didn't earn enough money to fill out a tax form. And so they weren't earning a lot of money, but it was a roof over our heads. And my father saved enough money in nine years to buy a first house for ten thousand dollars cash, and that must have taken an incredible amount of saving. But we never felt we were poor, we always said, "Oh, here's the excellent cook." And so Mom just had to make rice, and Dad always made dinner.

KL: Did you have friends in your neighborhood? Were there other kids around?

JM: All of the hotels along First Avenue from as far away as Market in Southwest Portland down to Gleason, all of First Avenue, Second Avenue, Third Avenue, if there was a hotel, they were all owned by Japanese. And each place was a safe house, so we were running around even after dark and going to visit our friends in other hotels. And my mother always said, "You can always outrun a drunk." Because we didn't have any problems with drugs at that time. She said you can always outrun a drunk, and you just walk on the outside of the sidewalk. And we felt perfectly safe. And in fact, even before the war, I remember, with my sister, and Mary Nakata and George Nakata and one other gal, I think her name was Ruth Yamamoto. We used to go... and the oldest of us would have been six or seven, eight maybe. Mary Nakata might have been the oldest, and she might have been eight years old. We used to go downtown at Christmastime and hit Meier & Frank's, Lipman's, and Olds, Wortman & King, and visit Santa Claus to get candy canes. And we did it with five of us, with the oldest person being under the age of ten. It just surprises me. And I can remember walking from First and Pine to Maletis on Third and Couch to buy a loaf of bread all by myself. Past Third and Burnside. Nowadays I drive it with my car doors locked. [Laughs] So anyway.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.