<Begin Segment 14>

JC: We didn't talk about this, but, so you had... one of your sisters stayed in Japan permanently?

FO: No, no. We're all here except my brother who finished his civil service stint in Japan and opted to stay during retirement, but he's still working for the American companies.

JC: So everybody in your family left?

FO: Oh, yes. We're all back.

JC: Your mom and all left. What year did you leave, they leave?

FO: Well, shortly after the war was over, everyone came back, so it was early '50s.

JC: Had your sister been there during the war?

FO: My, the youngers, uh-huh.

JC: What stories did they tell about being there?

FO: Oh, terrible stories like my one sister worked as a, like a nurse's aide. They turned the grade school which is just a few blocks from our home into a makeshift hospital, and she said it was horrid. They didn't have the supplies. They didn't have the medication, dying soldiers. She went through a real hard time. I think she's the only one who experienced that sort of... because the others were much younger. They didn't have to be out.

JC: And so you mentioned that there had been the bombing in --

FO: Oh, the whole city was bombed flat.

JC: So what did your family do at that time?

FO: Well, our house remained, and my mother was working as a cook in the factory for a short while. And then after she came back to the States, her, her accident, her pension was resumed. But we tried to get her back pay. But maybe if I had gotten a better lawyer, maybe we could have collected the back pay because the kids were still minors, and my brother was serving in the Korean War. I think if, if we worked harder, we could have collected the retro pay for her from that fund.

JC: So you mean that while she was in Japan, she did not receive her state accident insurance?

FO: That's right. After the war broke, they stopped it. And after she came back to the state, it got resumed. But she didn't get her retro pay which she should have because the kids were minors, and my brother was in service in Korean War.

JC: And your mother, you said she came after the war. So would that be in --

FO: Early '50s.

JC: In the early '50s.

FO: Uh-huh.

JC: Did she come back to Oregon?

FO: No. She came to California where my eldest sister resides.

JC: When your mom and your sister, when you talk with them, did they talk about what it was like immediately after the war in Japan?

FO: Uh-huh. We've heard stories.

JC: Can you remember some of those stories?

FO: Well, the fact that our home remained, and she felt the resentment of neighbors knowing that we had come back to Japan and were from America, and here her house didn't get bombed, and the whole city practically was flattened out.

JC: And so what was that, did they talk about what it was like to live in a city that had been bombed out, and, you know, what daily life was like from let's say 1945 until the '50s when they, when they left? That was an intense long period.

FO: Well, right after that when the U.S. occupation came in, there, my sister was hired as an interpreter for the police station and the Red Cross, and so they're mingling with the Americans right off.

JC: Was food easy to come by, or I wonder what it was like.

FO: I think the rationing was, it was real severe. And if you had relatives in the country or such, you could get food there, but I hear food was real tight. Have you, have you read the story, is it the Rising Sun? An American woman who married this diplomat, and she lived in Washington D.C., and she went back to Japan. She was American, Caucasian, and they lived right in our locale. And she wrote this book, and she talks about how scarce the food was. They would go up in the hills to scrounge for edible plants, and it was hard for everyone. And then we hear stories of how poorly fed the POWS, the American POWS were. And I told that to my mother one day. And she said, "Well, the rest of us didn't have anything to eat either." You know, the man who built our fireplace, he was an American POW, and he was incarcerated near our town. And when he mentioned that while he was building our fireplace, I said, "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that." Oh, he said, "Don't feel that way." He said, "While I was a POW, I had this one guard who befriended me." He would sneak in rice cakes or whatever. And he says, "My wish is I'd love to go back to Japan and meet up with him." That's a POW man who built our fireplace.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.