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LD: After the assembly center, during those war years, where did you go?

HT: Well, from the assembly center, there again, they needed, or volunteered to go to Tule Lake, open up Tule Lake with the canteens, I guess they call it canteens. It's kind of a grocery store just like 7-Eleven is. It is a small thing, pick-up place, and they want to open that up, and they needed volunteers. So John Ito, he was a grocery man too, he and I, we volunteered to go down there. So we were the last one in assembly center and the first one to leave assembly center and went to Tule Lake. We opened those canteens down there. Of course as you said, the war, they paid you, treat everything, but then they still had a place that you can pick up those things. And how much can you buy when you get paid sixteen dollars a month, nineteen dollars for professional? So I was there for that that, I think we went in there. And that fall, the labor shortage, so people from Eastern Oregon came out to recruit labor on their farm. So there again, I volunteered for that because I couldn't stand being in the camp. But that fall, I volunteered to go and then, but then Mother wasn't that well. But still I volunteered to go out and work in the grocery, I mean canteen, so they gave me a go-away party and everything. But then people start saying, "How can you leave your mom when she's not feeling well?" Well, she wasn't feeling good, but nothing that, you know. But when they told me that, well, I had no choice which I did not want to go out, so I didn't go out until next spring. That's when I went out with my brother to a labor shortage, see, and went out to the Shishido family and went to work for them and the harvesting of sugar beets and things.

LD: Where did you do the farming in that area?

HT: Well, like I said, we went to work for the Shishidos. And the following year now, my brother and I, we farmed on our own in Weiser, Weiser, Idaho. That's just across the river from, Snake River on the Idaho side. So we farmed there, brother and I farmed, but we farmed together, I think, two years. And then, let's see, two years, and then during that working time, that's where I met my wife, Mary, and we met her on the same farm that, the farm that originally went out to. So she keeps telling all her friends, she met me on the onion farm, "Sour man you got." [Laughs] That's where we met on that farm, originally. And then so I think it was a couple years later in 1946, we got married. So we went on our own to farm, and we farmed for three years, '46 and as you farm for three years until 1949. And there was kind of a twist there too, you know. At the end of that lease we didn't know what to do because we were doing fairly well on the farm, and then, but I always wanted to be in the grocery business. See, that was my first love so I was thinking about it. But then nothing in Portland that I knew of, you know. But so we just, during that winter we just debated what to do. And then finally, we decided well, since we did fairly well, why don't we just farm another five years. So we told the, the landlord lived in Vancouver, but his brother lived next door, see. So we told his brother, you just tell him that we'll take another five year lease, and he said okay. So that's when we told him we will go lease for another five years. And then we came into Portland for the holidays to see parents. They were here already, see. So we came there for the winter, for a month or so, and then we went back. And when I went back, they told us, "You don't have the farm. It's already been leased out." I said, "What do you mean, it's been leased out?" "Well, like I told you I was going to take it and you were supposed to get in touch with your brother, you know. But they never, the rumor had it that you went to Portland to get a grocery store, so they leased it out, you know." It was disgusting, so I told Mary let's pick up and leave. So that's when I came back to Portland, you see. That was that winter of 1949, not winter, the year of '49, 1949. That's how I came back into Portland.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.