<Begin Segment 27>

KL: How was that for the three... was it just your father and your son who spent the days together, or was your mother caring for him, too?

HF: My mother was there, too, but she found a job. And my mother was able to travel in Chicago, I don't know how she did it, come to think of it. She got on the streetcar and went wherever she wanted to go. Then she found the Japanese stores even before we did. And she went shopping, and then she found a job.

KL: Where were the Japanese stores?

HF: On Clark and Division.

KL: And then she found a job?

HF: She found a job, Hart Schaffner and Mark's, doing sewing, hand sewing on the suits. She worked there 'til she got married. And then her new husband decided he's going to open a restaurant on Western Avenue, so he opened up a restaurant, and then my mother got a stroke. So then they decided they'd better go back to Japan.

KL: Her husband was also a Japanese...

HF: Right, uh-huh.

KL: Where had he been during the war?

HF: I don't know where he was during the war. I don't even know how she met him.

KL: How did your father and Fred do together when your dad was taking care of him? Did they get along okay?

HF: They got along okay, yeah. My father didn't speak English, but then they got along.

KL: And when did, you said your mother remarried. What happened to your father?

HF: He had passed away. Died in 1951, and my mother got married around 1957, I think. And then she went back to Japan, and she passed away in 1961. I think she was happy to go back to Japan with her family. She stayed with her family.

KL: What do you know about their wartime experiences?

HF: I don't know anything about it. And then we went to Niigata where my parents were. And then Fred's parents were from Hiroshima, so we went there, too. That was after the atom bomb had been dropped, and so we saw, we went to the atom bomb museum, to see what happened.

KL: Is Hiroshima where he grew up, too, where he was with his uncle?

HF: Yes.

KL: What was that like for him?

HF: Well, he thought he was living with his mother and father.

KL: When you two went back though, how was that for him to see the place totally changed?

HF: Well, he met his cousin that he grew up with. And he changed so much. And then, because his parents were separated, divorced, he wanted to find out more about his mother. Well, they wouldn't tell him. They said, "We don't talk about her, so we don't know what happened." So he was very upset on that, 'cause he met several uncles, one was in Osaka. We met him, too, but they wouldn't talk about the mother, and he wanted to know more about her. Well, later on when we were in Chicago, she was going to come to U.S. and then meet him. That's when Barbara was about five or six years old, so Fred was a little bit older. She wanted to meet the grandkids. Well, in the meantime, she contracted cancer, so she passed away before she could come. So that was sad. So he couldn't meet her.

KL: Was she in touch with him like when he was a teenager or when he was in Manzanar?

HF: No, because his father had told him she passed away. So he thought she was, she had died. And then at one point, one of his friends said, "I saw your mother in Sacramento?" And he said, "How can you see my mother? My mother's dead."

KL: But do you think she was actually in the United States?

HF: No, she wasn't. Well, she could have been, we don't know.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.