<Begin Segment 21>

KL: When you were still at Manzanar and you were thinking about coming back to Los Angeles, how did you feel about coming back to Los Angeles?

MN: Happy. Three and a half years we didn't see any Caucasian people, only Japanese, and in some ways it's so hard, everybody's dark and kind of ugly. So when I came home, we took a bus to General Hospital to see a friend, and all these Caucasian people look so beautiful, because I haven't seen Caucasian people for three and a half years and they have white skin and they dress nice. I said, "Hold on, I didn't notice before how pretty Caucasian people was."

KL: How was your treatment when you came back to Los Angeles?

MN: It was okay. Nobody... I told you how once I went to a shoe store to buy shoes and they didn't want to wait on me, but that was the only thing. Everybody else was, treated us the same, nice.

KL: You said that your belongings were gone when you came back?

MN: Pardon?

KL: You had stored your --

MN: Oh yes, yes, they stole it.

KL: Were you able to, you were never able to find it or anything?

MN: No. We used to, we had a lot of nice things, but... we had a market before we leave, so my husband used to collect the silver dollars, he had a cigar box full and in there I had a penny. He had that, a lot of, but they were all gone.

KL: Did you go back to his store? Do you know --

MN: No, takes too much money to start.

KL: Where did you live when you came back to L.A.?

MN: Inglewood. My friend, my block leader Frank Yasuda, they lived in, they had a three-bedroom house in Inglewood, so they let us stay there for, as a guest for a few weeks. And he had another property and a little house, so after we moved to renting, rented a house until we came here.

KL: Mr. Yasuda had a rental house?

MN: Uh-huh.

KL: Okay.

MN: He was a successful businessman.

KL: What was his work?

MN: Pardon me?

KL: What kind of business?

MN: He had that market. It used to be you sell meat and vegetable in different department, same building. He owned a business. He was a smart man and had a lot of money, so he, we're not the only family he let stay. People that came out of the camp and no place to go, they let them stay.

KL: So many families came through his house.

MN: Through their house.

KL: Do you recall when they left Manzanar?

MN: Pardon me?

KL: Do you recall when they left Manzanar, the Yasudas? Was it early in 1945?

MN: 1945 we came out.

KL: How, you were again in a new situation, a new place with a new baby. Were you, did...

MN: I was young, so I guess I didn't care too much. Nothing worrying, I guess.

KL: Did you have worries about your daughter or your son when you left Manzanar? When you came back to L.A.?

MN: They were little. My son was only two months old, my daughter was three and a half, three.

KL: Did anything worry you about being in Los Angeles and your son being so little?

MN: No. We, all the Japanese, we're not the only ones. All my friends, they all were on the same boat.

KL: Was there -- well, you said, yeah, you said you had some help from your friends finding a place. You said you had some help from your friends finding a place to live. Were there any organizations that helped?

MN: Yeah, I don't know if they're called an organization or not, but they used Japanese, they had a Japanese school there, they used the Japanese school, church to... some of the people have no place to go, and we were lucky, we had Frank Yasuda's family, but some people, they have a friend like that, had a... they called, they had a name for it. Everybody just stayed in the same --

KL: A hostel?

MN: Hostel, yeah, called a hosteru, Japanese called hosteru. That's where most people stayed, I don't know, months and months, until they save enough money to rent a regular house or buy a regular house.

KL: Do you remember the names of the hostels, of the school or the church?

MN: They, we stayed in a church, right now church, that was a hostel. And over here, I think they used, mostly used Japanese schools. Before the war they had the Japanese school, kids used to go every Saturday, or every, after public school finish every day. So they used to have, mostly have a big building, so people stayed there.

KL: What was the school's name?

MN: Over here it's Benisu Gakuen. Gakuen is a Japanese school.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.