<Begin Segment 26>

KL: -- tape three of an interview with Hana Fukumoto in... I was going to say April, because that's when you left Manzanar, but it's actually August 5th of 2013. And we were talking about your work in Chicago, and I wanted to back up just a little bit and ask what you remember about leaving Manzanar.

HF: Oh, we left Manzanar, we got on a bus and then went up to Tonopah, I think. And then we went up to --

KL: Did anyone come to see you off, or did you have a gathering or anything?

HF: There must have been, but I don't remember. And then we went from Reno to... no, from Tonopah we went to Reno, and then we caught a train, got on a train, and then to go to Chicago. And then we got caught in a snowstorm in Cheyenne, so we were stuck there for a couple of days.

KL: Oh.

HF: And then the trains, you know, they were so full of servicemen traveling that we had no, hardly any place to sit. And it was really packed, so I sat in the baggage, I remember sitting in the baggage area, with just a platform, and then when we got stuck in Cheyenne, I think we went to a show in Cheyenne. There was nothing to do, we just got stock there. The train couldn't move anymore, and I think we were stuck about a couple of days. And then...

KL: How was that after living in Manzanar for three years, to be able to just go see a show? What was that like?

HF: That was really something, yeah.

KL: Did you think of it right away?

HF: Well, first, when we got to Tonopah, we got to sleep in a regular bed, and that was something. We had rented a room in some hotel, I don't know what hotel that was, and then we slept in a real bed. And then there was a girl that, she was traveling alone, and her parents wanted us to take her to Chicago with us because they didn't want her traveling alone, so she was with us until we got to Chicago, and then she was on her own.

KL: What was her name, do you recall?

HF: [Shakes head]. And then we got to Chicago. I don't know if my brother met us, or anyway, we went to his hotel, the hotel he was living in. He was living in some hotel on Jackson Street, I think. I think the name of the street was Jackson. So we got a room at the same hotel and stayed there, and then we went looking for an apartment, and apartments were very scarce at that time. We found one, then we found out that the lady that lived there had died of tuberculosis, so we said, "No, we don't want to stay here," so we moved to a different, found a different apartment. And then we stayed... oh, then we found another apartment, it was a housekeeping apartment, and we had to share the bathroom with another couple, which wasn't too bad. And it was just a kitchenette, and the bed, it was the Murphy bed that came out of the wall, and that was an experience right there. But then after a while we just left the bed down.

KL: What part of town was that? Was that close to Jackson Street and your brother...

HF: It was on the west side next to where my brother was living.

KL: Can you describe who else was in that neighborhood, who was living in the west side of Chicago, what it was like?

HF: Let's see. Well, the fellow that owned that apartment was Greek. It was a mixed neighborhood, most mostly white.

KL: Did you have any, did people respond well? How did people respond to you as Japanese Americans?

HF: Well, I remember saying, I don't know if I wrote this, I was saying that one time, somebody asked us, "Are you Japanese?" and we said, "No, I'm Mexican, I'm Spanish."

KL: Was that during the war, was that during the '40s?

HF: Yeah, it was. Then they didn't bother us.

KL: Did your landlord care?

HF: Pardon me?

KL: Did your landlord care that you had Japanese ancestry?

HF: No, he didn't care. That's why he rented it to us. Otherwise I don't think he would have rented to us.

KL: Yeah, I don't think so.

HF: So we stayed there for a while, and then my parents came, so then they stayed with us for a while. So there were quite a few of us in that one room. And then my mother, my parents found an apartment on Paulina Street, and they moved there. The rental was very cheap, it was an unheated apartment, you had to heat it yourself. So then we decided, well, my sister-in-law, I met my sister-in-law for the first time. She lived in Indiana with her husband. Well, she came to visit us during the wintertime when there's no work in the, on the farm. He came to Chicago to work, so he worked where my husband worked.

KL: Do you know where they lived in Indiana?

HF: Yes, in Hamlet, a little town called Hamlet. Do you know North Jesitt?

KL: Uh-uh. What part of the state is it in?

HF: It's the northern part. So anyway, they talked us into farming and sharecropping. Well, I said, "I don't want anything to do with farming, that's hard work." Well, she said, "Oh, we're gonna make a lot of money planting mint and selling mint oil. Well, it was so wet, we couldn't plant the mint. It rained too much. So then we lost whatever we saved. And so we left Indiana. They still stayed there, but we left and came back to Chicago, and my husband went back to work where he was working before.

KL: Where was that?

HF: Central Steel and Wire Company. It was on the, not real south, 51st and Western, I think. So he got a job back, and we went back to work, and I went back to work.

KL: What happened to your sisters from Manzanar? Where did they go?

HF: My sister went to Minnesota from camp. She went directly to Minnesota and she worked as a mother's helper up there. And then she got married, she met somebody, so she married. And then they came back to, they came to Chicago afterwards.

KL: What was it like to be separated from her? It sounds like you had done a lot together growing up.

HF: Well, I was very... so it didn't bother me. And then she was up there anyway in Minnesota. And then my younger sister was with my mother and my father, and then they babysat my oldest. And then he was, Fred, he was saying that Grandpa was tall, but that was because -- my father was not tall -- because he was small, the thought Grandpa was tall, but he wasn't.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.