<Begin Segment 15>

TI: So about this time, the government started enforcing things like curfews and things like that on the Japanese community. Did those things hinder the... I'm guessing you had to do memorial services for your father and all that. I mean, was that difficult during this time to make those kind of arrangements?

KO: Well, the funeral service for Father was a daytime service. I don't think a nighttime service was the norm, even at that time.

TI: And was this held at the Buddhist church?

KO: No, it was held at the funeral home.

TI: Now, I was thinking that your father, because he helped found the Buddhist church, having a minister from the church would have been probably the norm. But then in many communities, the Buddhist ministers were all picked up by the FBI.

KO: That's right.

TI: And so I was wondering, like then, do you remember who presided over your father's memorial service?

KO: No, I don't.

TI: Because in many cases, the people who would normally do that weren't around.

KO: That's right.

TI: Do you remember the memorial or the funeral service and what that was like?

KO: No, I don't.

TI: With your father gone, talk about how your family just coped. I mean, so it was the time period where weeks later, about six weeks later, you started finding out that people are going to be removed from Portland. You have this hotel, so there's all these things that have to happen in a short period of time right after your father has died.

KO: Uh-huh.

TI: So tell me what was going on as a family. How did you guys do this? It must have been very difficult.

KO: Yeah. Well, the leadership of the family fell on Masako. She was now twenty-one. But she did have some good Caucasian friends, one of them was an attorney who helped her through the business of straightening out the business papers, rewording the lease so that Father could be relieved from the... I don't know how long term, what kind of a lease agreement he had entered into in 1940, but I'm sure to rent space in this building and run a hotel business, you don't say, "Well, I'm going to run it for a year, will you rent me the place?" It's usually for five or ten years. But my sister Masako, with the advice of an attorney friend, took care of the business that way. My mother was...

TI: And taking care of it was to, I guess, to end the lease so that the transaction that was...

KO: And then selling the business.

TI: I see.

KO: You end the lease agreement with the owner of the building. After that you have the, you have all your furniture and the furnishings, business arrangements with the fuel company and the laundry companies, things like that you have to disconnect.

TI: And so your older sister kind of took care of all those.

KO: Yeah. And then, of course, for the personal things of our pre-moving, you have to sort through the stuff that you are gonna take with you, because you can only take what you can carry.

TI: And during this time, you mentioned earlier your oldest sister, (Masako), had returned to the United States about 1936. Where was she during this time?

KO: She came back in '36 and married in '38.

TI: Okay, so she was with her other family.

KO: Yeah, and she and her husband were living about forty miles away from Portland.

TI: So that's why (Masako) was taking care of all this. Now during selling all these things, was the family able to get fair prices for the things they sold?

KO: I don't think anyone got a fair price for... I have no idea what the final settlement was. But no one ever got anything that they thought they should get, or even personal things like a bicycle I had. I'd just bought a bicycle six months earlier. I don't remember what I paid for it, but if I paid fifty dollars for it, I know that I didn't sell it for even close to fifty dollars. But that was about the way it was. The general feeling here is one cent on the dollar or whatever it was.

TI: And so was the family able to store some of the things someplace, or was it just really sell everything?

KO: We didn't do anything about storing anything. Everything was sold, what we could sell, given away, or burned or trashed or something. We had nothing left.

TI: So you were literally what you could carry was what you had left.

KO: Uh-huh.

TI: And you had to do that in a matter of weeks?

KO: I don't remember what day exactly in April the people of Portland were told to go, but it was, I would guess we were, we had two, three weeks...

TI: To do that. To essentially liquidate everything.

KO: Yeah.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.