Densho Digital Archive - Hanako Hoshiyama Fukumoto Interview (denshovh-fhanako-01-0017)

<Begin Segment 17>

KL: Who else was from Fred's family who was in Manzanar?

HF: His father.

KL: Where did he grow up and what was his background?

HF: He grew up, he was sent to Japan when he was six months old.

KL: Fred was?

HF: Fred was. And then he came back to the U.S. when he was nine years old, and then he was told that, "Your father is in America, so you're going to go to America." And he said, "My father's here." He thought his uncle was his father. And then his aunt in Japan passed away, he thought that was his mother, but it wasn't. His parents were divorced, and that's very unusual for that time. So he came to America in, let's see, 1931. And he lived with his father. He had a sister in camp, but I never met her until after the war, until we went to Chicago one year and that's where I met her. She was quite a bit older. And she passed away a couple years, few years ago.

KL: Was it hard for him to come back to the United States?

HF: Well, you don't know where you're going, you don't know anything about it, and just, that somebody told him you're going to see your father, he couldn't believe it.

KL: What did he think... one of the divisions that people talk a lot about some in camp is between the Kibei-Nisei and the U.S. Nisei. Did he have any feelings about being Kibei, or did it affect his time in Manzanar?

HF: No, he didn't say. It didn't seem to.

KL: Who did he hang around with? Who were his friends?

HF: Well, he hung around with a lot of Kibeis, because his brother was a Kibei, too. He had a half brother that was quite a bit older than him. And he was sent to Japan, but he lived with a different uncle.

KL: Were you able to make friends with Fred's Kibei friends, was it pretty easy?

HF: Yes, uh-huh. Because I spoke a little Japanese.

KL: So you said Fred went to Oregon? What did he do in Oregon?

HF: He became a supervisor. Because, well, he didn't know anything about fruit trees or anything, but then he said that's a better job than picking the fruit or pruning or whatever. So he learned how, he's a fast learner, so he learned how to prune, and he showed a group, he got the group together, the boys together, and then he was like a foreman.

KL: Did he get the group together in Manzanar or out in Oregon?

HF: In Oregon. And he did that because we were planning to leave Manzanar, and we didn't have any money, so he said he's gonna go earn money so we can leave camp, and that's why he went.

KL: Had he already gone to Idaho?

HF: He had gone to Idaho before he met me and I met him. That was the first year.

KL: So you were talking about going to camp. How did that happen? I mean, I'm sorry, you were talking about leaving the camp. What were your options?

HF: Well, we couldn't go back to California, so you could go to the Midwest or the East Coast, and we didn't want to go to New Jersey where everybody was going to Birds Eye, the factory there, and we didn't want to go there.

KL: Why not?

HF: I don't know why not. But anyway, my brother was in Chicago, so we decided, well, we'll go there to see how it is. And there were plenty of jobs in Chicago.