Densho Digital Archive - Yooichi Wakamiya Interview (denshovh-wyooichi-01-0023)

<Begin Segment 23>

RP: You have any recollections, Yo, of the day that the war ended with Japan?

YW: I remember. Bunch of us were playing and we were takin' a rest, and one of the brothers came over and he says, "The war is over," and this is George Hamamoto. He was the older brother of, of one of the brothers I was playing with. And he said, "The war's over." I said, "What are you talkin' about?" He says, "A few days ago the United States dropped a couple of unknown kind of bombs we never heard of." He says, "I think it was called atomic," he says, "but it was so devastating the war's over." That's all I remember. And his younger brother Bobby says, "Where'd you hear that from?" He says, "Dad went down to the central office where they had a radio," 'cause we weren't allowed to keep radios, so these guys would go down and listen to the news, and he came back with that news. He said the war's over. I said, "What?" It didn't sink in to me that maybe we could leave. That didn't make any sense to me at all. So as the talk progressed among the community members, they said, "I guess they're gonna close this place down. They're gonna let us out maybe, huh?" And true to that prediction, we were out by the end of the year. We, we were one of the last to leave. I think we may not have been the, we were either the last or the next to last group to leave Arkansas. November 16th is when we left.

RP: Did you, do you ever remember discussions amongst your parents and you about what your future would be after you left camp?

YW: My dad didn't know what he was gonna do. He says, "I don't think I want to start carnation over again." He says, "I'm four, five years older and I know how much hard work that was. I don't think I want to do that again," he says. "That's gonna take a lot of capital to get started." Says, "I have a little bit of money. I can start over, but I need a lot more to really start and I think my age is against me to do, starting at the middle of, mid-forties." So he says, "I don't know what I'm gonna do for a living, but we'll figure out." So we ended up in the trailer camps. He had heard that the local fish canneries were hiring men and women for seasonal work. By that they meant if the ships came in with fish they would need the men to offload the fish, then they would need the women to help with the processing and can, put 'em in the cans. So my, both my mother and my father worked down in the canneries for a few months, but the hours were never regular 'cause the fishing boats come in whenever, right? And remember I told you earlier that this man from Terminal took off and ended up in our Japanese language school? Well that man, before the war, was a gardener. He took care of yards. He told my dad, "You know, you're good with your hands and soil." He says, "I'll teach you how to do this gardening thing and you can do it on your own." He says, "It's a quick job. You just buy a few tools and you can do that for a while, 'cause I know starting your farm is an awful lot of money." So this fellow named Mr. Mizumoto helped my dad by takin' around his routes for a couple of weeks and he picked it up. He said, "There's nothing to this thing. I know how to take care of plants. You just got to figure out how to take care of lawns," and that was easy, he learned that. So that's what he did 'til he retired, and he was able to feed his family doing that. And since he had money from before the camp to put a down payment on a house, he was a little bit ahead of a lot of people in that way. He had money. So that's how we started, and we, we got started in Long Beach that way and stay anchored there 'til I got out of college and I moved, after I got married I moved to L.A.