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MR: Well, let's go back to your time in Japan and in your return to the U.S. which was December 1940, you said.

MB: Yes. I came back in 1940. I went to school, high school, for a little while, got my diploma, and then I went on to Saint Helen's Junior College. I had, math was my easiest subject, and I wanted to become an accountant, and my mother said, "No. You will learn, only way you can go to college if you become a nurse." Well, I didn't care much for nursing. But that was, if that was the only thing she'll let me study to go to college, I'll study it, so I was studying nursing, and that's when the war happened. I mean not the war, the war had already, the war, I was going to college when the war happened, and I went to school until the following year, 1942, April, when they moved us into assembly center in Portland.

MR: Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed? Where were you when, what were you doing when Pearl Harbor was bombed?

MB: I was going to college. I was in school.

MR: And so what were you thinking when that happened?

MB: Well, we had, the market opened, and we couldn't, it was a Sunday morning, and we couldn't figure it out. Here it was 9 o'clock, and we hadn't had a single customer. Usually, the customers started coming at 7 o'clock, and it was a beautiful day. There weren't many cars on the road, and no one, no one, no customers came. And then about, oh, little time after that, one of our neighbors, Japanese fellow came by and said, "The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor," and then we realized that was why we never had any customers. Well, and the rest of that day, people would come by, and they'd throw rocks at us, toward us, bricks, clods of dirt, whatever, and they'd call us "Japs," and I mean they were mean to us. And I was going to college, but even riding the streetcar, the other riders would give me a bad time, so I never, I went to school but not every day, I was afraid.

MR: And so at what time did you learn that you were going to be relocated?

MB: It was, was it in March? February or March they said that they were going to get us off the West Coast, and I think it was about the third or fourth of April, they came and we could leave. Oh, they gave us two weeks' notice to get rid of everything because they were going to put us into camp. Well, what they were doing was send us to the assembly center before they send us to camp. And in that two weeks' time, we had to get rid of everything. We stored most of the furniture in warehouse as did a lot of other people, and we had our plants, and we had the greenhouse and the house, and so we got a friend that, to stay in the house. He was to stay in the house for free if he looked after the plants and everything, took care of the place. When we came back in 1945, I think it was August, my sister had sent him a letter saying that we'll be coming home and to please vacate the house. Well, we came home, and he wouldn't, he was still living there, and my sister says, "Didn't you get my letter?" "What letter?" "The letter saying that we were coming home." He said he never got the letter. And my sister asked him to leave because we wanted to move in, and, "No, I don't have to move. You have to give me sixty days' notice." So she went to her lawyer, see a lawyer, and the lawyer told her send him a registered letter he had to sign for and give him sixty days' notice, so she did that. And even after the sixty days was up, he wouldn't move out. The reason was that he was building himself a new house, and it would be another month before the house was finished. And rather than move someplace else, he just wanted to stay there, so it was another month or three months all together before we could move in. Well, the day we moved in, we opened the front door, no flooring. My mother had oak wood flooring, number one oak wood. She loved that floor. It was a beautiful, you know, number one oak, and she kept it waxed, and it was a real pretty floor. That floor was gone. In the market, the floor of the market, the planks were gone. I mean, we could see ground down there. And what he had done, he took out, took off the doors of our built-in cabinets, used them in his new house. I guess the flooring went into the new house. He was supposed to take care of our dog. We had a dachshund or one of those low slung dogs, and we don't know what he did with the dog. He didn't have it. He said it ran away, but I don't think it ran away. And he was supposed to take care of, since we had the green house, we had a mother plant and then we took cuttings, you know, for different bushes and things like that, and all our choice mother plants were gone, replaced by common everyday stock. And it was, so it was another, oh, about two weeks I guess it was before we finally got settled in because my brother had to put down flooring, and this time, he never put in a real good wood flooring. He just, so we could get by, and then they bought, put a carpet over the floor. But, and the furniture that we had stocked, left in storage, they were broken up. The roof had started to leak, and the owner never did anything, and so, you know, when wood gets the furniture, they break apart. And we got the furniture back, but they're miserable. It wasn't very happy. We had, at least we had a place to go back to because we owned our place. Those people that didn't have any place to go back to relocated elsewhere.

MR: So what relocation center or what assembly center did you go to first?

MB: Okay. The assembly center, it was North Portland International Livestock Building, and they hastily cleaned the stalls, you know, the care building, and put in plywood floors and plywood walls, no ceiling, of course, because the roof for the pavilion was our ceiling, and no doors, no windows. And for privacy, Mama hung up curtains so no one can see in. And the light was a single light bulb they hung down, but I don't remember what time it was, nine o'clock or ten o'clock, lights went out automatically, so you were in the dark. The only thing that I remember about that place is since it was summertime, we had to fight millions of flies and the smell of manure. That was, that was our constant companion, the smell of manure and the million flies, and I know that first two weeks we were there, we all had diarrhea, and we were sick. I lost twelve pounds in those two weeks. My brother lost fourteen pounds, and that was the same with everybody else because they were sick all the time. And the food we ate, we had to eat in shifts because they couldn't feed us all at one time. The first shift, the military police who were guarding us ate; and the second shift, the Japanese ate; the third shift, the Japanese ate. But if you missed out the first shift, no use going to the third shift because there wasn't anything to eat. And as it was, the military police ate, they ate up all the meat. We had leftover broth with some vegetables, always bread. That's something we always had was white bread, and my brother said they had margarine too, only I don't remember margarine because I only remember the bread. Oh, margarine. When I was a kid, margarine was white in color. It look just like lard. And oh, two, three years later, the company with a pound of lard, they gave you a small packed that had some red powder in it, and you poured the powder on the white lard like margarine, and you had to mix it up and make your yellow coloring, and so then we had margarine that was yellow in color. Now you could buy it already yellow.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.