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JK: And then when you returned home, you came back home. You didn't have a home to come to because your rental home wasn't available to you anymore. Where did the family go then?

AO: When I did not come back with them, they came back separately, but they went to Vanport, and they lived in Vanport, which was the federal subsidized housing for this area. Most of the people who lived in Vanport were workers who had come to the Portland/Vancouver area to work in the shipyards, and so they were mostly from the south who came here and lived in Vanport.

JK: And how did your dad restart his business, his newspaper?

AO: Well, he tried to find out where his printing press and the type, Japanese type were, because when he came back to this area, they were no longer in the basement of the hotel where my mother had stored things. He had found out then that the federal government had confiscated all the printing presses and the type, and had used them during the war to print propaganda leaflets in the Pacific Theatre. So He had nothing to come back to at all to set up a business again. So the only thing that he could do was set up a Japanese newspaper here on mimeograph paper. And so he had a mimeograph machine, and he wrote all of the articles in Japanese by hand. And so he did all the Japanese part, and Kimi Tambara, he hired Kimi Tambara to do the English part of the newspaper.

JK: So his newspaper, from a staff of twenty to thirty people became a staff of two?

AO: Two.

JK: So it really suffered from the war.

AO: Right.

JK: And what were you doing? You didn't live in Vanport, you moved on?

AO: No, before I came back from evacuation, from Minidoka in ('43) I went to Chicago in November of ('43), stayed there for a couple months, and then went to college, Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, in January of ('44). I went there because it was a Methodist school, and I got exposed to the Methodist church here in camp, in Minidoka. And so I got a Methodist scholarship to go to this Methodist school in Winfield, Kansas, and became baptized as a Methodist there. I turned eighteen in April of '42... no, that would have been '44, I'm sorry. I spent a year in Minidoka going to school, so I turned, in April of '44 I turned eighteen, and I got my draft notice to go in the army. And the war wasn't over yet in '44, so I left Southwestern College at the end of the semester, in May, and went to Salt Lake City to be inducted into the army at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City. And so then I had my physical exam there, and I flunked it. I was a 4-F, which is not fit for military duty. And I didn't like that designation, so I said, "Is there anything else you can put me in?" and they said, "Well, we can put you in 1-A limited, and as long as the war is going on, you won't be taken because we don't want limited, physically limited people fighting overseas." So I said, "Okay, put me in 1-A limited," and they did. So they didn't take me in the army, and so I decided to do something else. And so I went to work on the railroad, the SP&S Railroad, which is between Spokane, Portland, and Seattle, was hiring Japanese people to work on the railroad. But we couldn't work in the Portland to Seattle area because that was still an area where Japanese could not be present. So I worked from Spokane to Pasco.

[Interruption]

AO: Well, I can say that I went to work for the railroad for a year, and then the war ended, World War II ended in August of 1945. I was still working on the railroad at that time, but because the war ended in August, I felt that, well, I might as well leave the railroad and come back to the West Coast, which was now open, and attend school. So in September of '45, the next month after the war ended, I came back to the Portland area and got a scholarship to attend Pacific University in Forest Grove. So I spent the following year there in Forest Grove. At that time, my wife -- I wasn't married then, of course -- Mas was attending Linfield at McMinnville, so we were able to see one another every so often. The summer of '46, after the school year, from '45 to '46 was over, I didn't know what I was going to do in the summer of '46. And Yosh Inahara, Dr. Toke Inahara's brother, was also attending Pacific University. So he said, "Why don't you come out to our (farm) in Ontario? You can work on the farm during the summer." And I said, "Okay, I'll go with you." So we both went to Ontario, and I was working on the farm there.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.