Densho Digital Archive - Frances Ota Interview (denshovh-ofrances-01-0002)

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JC: So how did it come that you came back to America, and who came with you or how did that work?

FO: I came all alone.

JC: Tell me about that experience.

FO: Well, it was sad, but I think it was sadder for my mother letting me go at that age because I was sixteen. But she also sent my brother, an older brother. I'm third in line, and my brother, I remember my mother saying -- his name is Joe -- "I want Joe to hurry up and hurry to America because I don't want him drafted in the Japanese army." And I thought, oh, she was wise. So he came before, he was the second, and I was the third to come.

JC: And so what year was that, Frances?

FO: 1941, June, six months before the war.

JC: So talk about --

FO: And here I'm pleading with my sister. There's so much war talk. I'm not going to be able to return. And she'd say, "Oh, you don't know what you're talking about." And I even told her that they're saying America is going to, when they say there's something about Hawaii now. I remember telling this to the army official, but I don't quite remember, something about Hawaii, I remember.

JC: So they were preparing the Japanese people for the attack on Pearl Harbor in some way or --

FO: Oh, what was that about Hawaii that, "We will take Hawaii," was that it, that Japan was saying, "We'll take Hawaii." There's something about Hawaii there that I vaguely remember. But I remember writing to my sister and with her saying, "You've never had it so good, stay where you are."

JC: So you're sixteen years old, and it's six months before Pearl Harbor. Talk about that time for you, and tell me what happens when Pearl Harbor occurs.

FO: Well, I came, my sister met me in Seattle. I came on this Hikawa Maru. It's the same ship that we had gone to Japan on, and here I'm returning on the same Hikawa Maru. But it was lonely and sad. I thought goodness, being adventurous at that age because it was my own determination that I wanted to return. But my sister met me in Seattle, and I was taken into the Southworth's home, and I spent the summer there. In the fall, I entered Gresham High School as a junior. But that, my education had been so sort of smattering. I had, the Japanese schooling was really rough. The only, I could do the math, but if it came to story problems, I was sunk. But the Japanese schooling was what has only be, helped me. The etiquettes and the flower arranging, some of the nice cultural things that, those are hardest to remember. But other than that, reading and writing very rough when you have not had the basics in earlier years. It's like a foreign language here in high school. You lose it as fast as, it just doesn't stay with you. But conversational Japanese, I'm told I do all right because when we traveled to Japan, people were marveled. But you're coping for the right words when you don't use the language because we never used the Japanese language in the home. So like my son, it's too bad that he's had French in St. Helen's Hall, but he's never had any Japanese which in a way is too bad today.