Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: Yoneko Hara Interview
Narrator: Yoneko Hara
Interviewer: Margaret Barton Ross
Location: Portland, Oregon
Date: July 18, 2003
Densho ID: denshovh-hyoneko-01-0015

<Begin Segment 15>

MR: And how did you keep in contact, or could you, with your father?

YH: He could write out, but it was censored, and so there were areas that were cut out, if he talks about the day or the temperature or anything of that type, it was cut out and censored. And I think he wrote to my mother. He wrote to me a lot when I got out of camp. Well, first my sister decided, they started saying we can go back east. You can't go back to the coast, but you can go the other way. So she signed up and went to Denver as a housegirl. And then she was there about a month and I thought, "Well, maybe I'll go to Washington, D.C. Maybe I'll become a WAC." And my dad wrote back saying, "No, no WAC." And then my sister said, "It's so lonesome here, come to Denver." And I've always been a tagalong of her, every place she goes, I go. And so I went to Denver, I signed up to do housework. And I said I couldn't do housework, and so they offered me sixty dollars a month, which was quite a lot then, and room and board. So this fellow meets me and he's Jewish, and he's the nicest guy I've ever met. And he meets me, and I have a room in the basement, and his wife is a blond Southern gal, they're sort of not the norm. And she's nice, too, but she had a bad back, so needed a housekeeper. And she would help me cook, because I'm not a very good cook at nineteen years old. And then cleaning house, well, I cleaned our house so I knew the basics, but I wasn't a real pro at it. And so finally one day she said, "You really aren't a housekeeper, are you?" And I said, "Well, I do what I can." We'd eat together if they're home.

And then I started, I decided I had to get out of this, and I went to night school to learn typing and shorthand, because I never took that in high school. And so I'd go twice a week in the evening, Monday and Thursdays are maid's day off, so I'd go get on the bus, go down, go to class, and I'm not very good on directions, I'm always on the wrong corner. My sister says, "What are you standing here for?" and I said, "I'm going home." She says, "You go on the other side over there to catch your bus." I said, "Oh," and I'd look around. I'm just never, direction-wise I'm not very good. So she'd see me off and then she'd go home. She didn't know where I was going to end up. But I did that, oh, maybe a year, two years. And then he asked me one day if I'd like to work in his office. So I worked in his office, and then I had to find a place to live. And so we ended up on Third and someplace, and it's not like Chinatown, but it's sort of like close to the old... it was, oh, let's see, in reference, comparison here. It wasn't in the good area, but it had some residents, residential area. So we ended up there, and it was Japanese-owned. So my sister got the place, and all she had was a basement apartment. And so we were in the basement where they'd do their laundry, and we were cooking down there. And she worked in a jewelry shop, and so I worked for Rodinsky's, and go to work.

And then we'd go to the dances. I'd learned to dance someplace in between, and we'd go to the dances at the Y, which was run by this Peggy... I forgot her last name, but she's a Quaker. The Quakers don't dance, though, do they? But she was so good, everybody was helpful. Makes you feel like you're a part of society, and you meet people from all over California, Washington, Oregon, and they have these dances. And I danced with this one guy and he said, "You know, you look like a guy I met downtown," and it was my brother. And he was in Denver, and we didn't know it. And I said, "Where'd you meet him?" I don't know why, I questioned him a lot, and then the next day we went looking for him. And it's funny, we found him, but I don't quite remember how we found him. And he was living with this old man and a young girl, and the situation was just not real good. And he was working at someplace, so I said, "Greg, you have to come and live with us." And he came, and he slept out on like a sofa or something. And then, so we started making, he was working, so we'd make lunch for him and he'd go to work. And then one day, I don't know how we discovered it, but he had lost his job and he was taking his lunch, and we don't know where he was going all day, but he'd come home by night. And we found all this, this all comes out in the process. And then we found out he had, my sister had my mother's gold watch, and he had taken that and pawned it, got some money, and she found the ticket. So she went down and got it out. And I thought, "We're going to have problems with this guy." But he's pretty good. I sort of get tough with him. And then we moved upstairs, they had a vacancy. But in the meantime, he disappeared, he's gone. And we don't know where he went. And I forgot if he called or he wrote, he's in Arizona, and he'd gone with this other Japanese fellow, and he said he needed to give his blood to his sister. And we had no way of reaching him, so we had to let him go forever. He ended up in Chicago. He worked in a restaurant doing pots and pans. And then so we moved upstairs and we were there until the war ended. But wait, in between, I was living in a, in a hotel in town with this other gal, sort of mixed up there.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.