<Begin Segment 20>

KL: So you were in the hospital having your son when the war ended. What do you remember about receiving the news of the atomic bombs and the Japanese surrender?

MN: Well, it was sad, but nothing we can do, so just took it.

KL: What did you hear about those bombs?

MN: In Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I think I heard it in the camp.

KL: They were totally new. I mean, it was the first time people had heard of an atomic bomb. Do you remember what, what did you think that they were? Or what was your understanding of...

MN: Well, my mother was Hiroshima, not in the town, but outside of Hiroshima. She said a big cloud went up and pretty soon she, she broke all the windows, because she was about, how many miles from, five, six miles from where the bomb dropped. But her windows broken, but nothing else, just the windows.

KL: When did you first talk to your parents again after the war? To your mom, I guess.

MN: My father died before the war ended, so I never had a chance to talk to him, but my mother lived, she was eighty-six when she passed away, she, when I was fifty-nine. So twenty, about thirty years, almost thirty years ago she was alive.

KL: Did you talk first in letters, after the war ended?

MN: Yes. I went to see her four times before she died.

KL: What else did she tell you about what it was like in Hiroshima during the war?

MN: She said that was terrible. My father was sick, but they couldn't even get a piece of aspirin, nothing. And no matter how much money you had, she couldn't buy a single egg or something. So she bought a chicken to have eggs. Somebody stole the chicken, because there's not enough food there. She said it was terrible, during the war and right after the war. They had, we had it easy here.

KL: Yeah, I think it's very different to be at a war than across the ocean. What was it like to be at Manzanar and watch people leave? You were at Manzanar until the end.

MN: A lot of people, not to come back to West Coast but they could relocate, so a lot of people went to a place called Birds Eye, you ever heard of Birds Eye frozen food? They make it back east.

KL: In New Jersey.

MN: New Jersey, yeah. A lot of people relocate there to work.

KL: Did you and Kay consider that?

MN: Pardon me?

KL: Did you and your husband think about going east?

MN: Yeah, but my children were small and we didn't go, so just came out to California after the, after three and a half years. I think Seabrook was the place. Yeah, I knew a lot of people that relocated to Seabrook, worked in the Birds Eye frozen food place.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.