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Do you recall if your family was discussing the loyalty oath?

Yes, but it was sort of more like, "Oh, what is this?" you know, "What is this?" They didn't take it seriously, "Well, what should we put on here? Should we say no? Well, maybe yes." It wasn't taken seriously at all; I think they thought, "Well lets put down yes, yes," and the women had to fill this out as well as men and it went over sixteen.

So you never did one yourself?

I was too young, but I do remember how they did this. Later on, I heard that there was somebody in my writing class, he said that, because everybody else was saying no, he thought, "well I'm going to say no too." And so he put no-no. And that was the reason why he was transferred to Tule Lake. I mean it was that imbecilic really.

Information and resettlement

Did you have any different ways of accessing the media or news other than the Minidoka Irrigator?

By then there were people who would come in and out and actually some of the soldiers would come in on furloughs and they would come in and tell us what was going on. We had some access to the outside, we would go to Twin Falls after we had been there for a while then they would give us passes to go out to Twin Falls. And we would get our teeth fixed or do something like that buy some clothes. We had some contact but not a lot and again it was the rumors. There was a woman who said, " Oh Japan just won the war!" So we said, "What!?" and of course that was a rumor. That I don't know how she heard that, or what. But after you hear so many rumors you just wait for some verification of it.

Were there any deaths or severe injuries sicknesses or suicides that you heard about?

Yes, there were mental health issues. One friend of ours, who also had a hotel business, just was so concerned she and her family did not sell her hotel business and left it with somebody she hardly knew. So she just worried and worried and worried and pretty soon she would get these strange ticks and strange behaviors and hearing things and whatever. At one point, she was placed into the mental hospital for a while and then she got out and when she was ready to go home to Portland. She was fine she was really back to herself again. That's just one instance I knew very well, and there were other people who just became ill, physically ill from some of this and there were some people who started drinking, that's what I heard. There was a lot of— there were suicides. Some of the suicides happened after they returned to Portland so yes there was a lot of anxiety, and pain, and concern.

So were you given any sort of information that would lead you to believe you were going to leave Minidoka soon?

Yes, what happened was, just as we were forced to go into camp they were given notice that we had to leave camp. And my one sister, Arlene and my brother, had already left camp. They were trying to get the young adults out of camp as quickly as possible because they wanted to—I think before they got too restless. So they left camp to go to Cincinnati they couldn't come back to the west coast, but they could go back east. And there were hostels set out for them by the American Friends Service. And so they went back to Cincinnati. So that left my father, my one brother, and my one sister and so we got this notice and they said that you must leave. And it said that, we don't care where you go. We will give you a one-way train ticket or bus ticket and twenty-five dollars for your resettlement. They said, if you find a place where you want to go then that's where you go but if you cant find a place to go or don't have a place you know you want to go then we're going to send you back to where you came from. My father wanted to go back to Portland and so he went to Portland by himself to see if he could get another business. At that point, he said there were no businesses that he could afford. Remember he just didn't have that much money anymore because first of all he didn't get very much. So he looked around and stayed there for almost a month trying to get a business. And he said there weren't that many on the market at that point either. The war wasn't over yet, not quite yet.

When he came back into camp they said well, you got to leave, and remember I told you my father always wanted us to start school on time. He said, "we've got to do something, so some friends he had—he had friends not me— he had some friends in Salt Lake City and they said, "Well, this isn't a bad place to come, why don't you just come out here and maybe you will find something,” so he went out there and he found an apartment. He thought he had a job with the dry-cleaning establishment as a dry-cleaner. And as a tailor, because he had had this business before he had the apartment house businesses.

Salt Lake City

He came back to camp he said okay, we're all set, lets go. So we went by train to Salt Lake City, I was very unhappy because I did not know anyone in Salt Lake City. One of my friends went to Portland, another had gone to Minneapolis, and these are my best friends. I didn't know anyone there, I had never been there and I was not a happy camper at all. That's how we got to Salt Lake City, my father immediately went to the place where he had interviewed before, and they said, "Oh, I'm so sorry we have given the job to another internee yesterday."He thought, "Wow how come?"Apparently they said, "Well, there was another person who came, and we didn't know when you were going to be here s we just thought well this man is ready to work so we just took him." Father did not have a job and so he thought, "What am I going to do?" He never shows this emotion. I can tell you he just sometimes, he'll sometimes make a joke about it so we don't worry about it.

He looked in the newspaper and saw that there was the best paying job that he could find in the newspaper—at that time—that would fit him. Which was, he did not speak very much English, mostly Japanese. He could run a business, he knew enough English to say, "Pay the rent" and run a business but to get a really, a skilled job was not easy. At that point, too, remember he's in his late fifties now so he decided he was going to look for a job at the University Club. They were advertising for a cook and he had never cooked a day in his life, the only thing he made ever was rice, nothing else. So he went there and he was hired and they said, "OK come seven o'clock in the morning and you will fix breakfast."

So he went there at seven in the morning and they said “OK, two eggs over easy.” So he said, "Hmm well, I've learned on the job before, I think I can do this." So he tried to crack an egg and they went all over his hand, tried to crack another egg went all over his hand. He says, he did that five times and finally the manager came over and said, "Have you ever cooked in a restaurant before?" And he says, "No." He was switched to the dishwasher. And that was the job he had, and it didn't pay very well and whatever, but that isn't the worst part.

What happened was winter came and there was snow and ice and father worked a split shift. He worked from seven to eleven and then he went back to work from three o'clock to seven. During the intervening four hours he would come home, rest, then go back. On one of these day when it was snowing and it got cold in the afternoon it was very icy and he was trying to run to get his bus to go back to work. He slipped on the ice and he fell. He couldn't get up and he didn't know what to do because traffic was going by and he couldn't get up because it was so painful. His pelvis was so painful. Suddenly, a man drove by and then stopped and went over to him and said, "Well, can I help you?" And father said, "Go home, Go home., " Father described him as this giant man, Okido. He gently picked him up and put him in his car and drove him to our home and placed him on the bed. And father said, "Well, he did it so gently and so kindly." My sister was thinking, "Well, what can I give him or what can we do besides saying thank you?" But he said, "you're very welcome" and he left. We never did get this mans name because we were so involved with what was going on. We didn't have any health insurance—in those day there wasn't very much of it anyway—but not a whole lot of money. So, we had the doctor come to the house and without X-rays, without hospitalization, he made the diagnosis that father had fractured his pelvis. He told us how to make a pelvis sling, and a contraption to go over the bed with counterweights on the other side of the bed. And so I think the medical supply people came out and fixed that up.

And now father was in bed for six weeks. The doctor said after 6 weeks he'll probably be alright and be able to get and move so at this point we were wondering you know we don't have any funds and no income so my brother Tom—who was in high-school—decided he would work. He was by then the leader for the wrestling team and he just loved doing that he just loved it, but he gave that up so he could go to work in the produce market where my brother-in-law was. I looked in the Utah Nipo—that's the Japanese vernacular newspaper—and found a job for a domestic, they used to call them, "school girls" if you worked while you went to school.

So I went to interview, this women who blew smoke in my face all the time she was interviewing me it turned out she was the wife of the editor and chief of The Salt Lake Tribune and Telegram. The first thing she said was, Well, your a little young aren't you and I said, "Well, I'm fourteen." And she said, "Well, can you cook?" And I had just learned how to make muffins in the eighth grade, and I said, "Oh yes, I know how to cook. I know how to cook, I know how to make white sauce, and I make muffins" And so she looked at me and said, "Well, you know how to take care of children?" I baby-sat once and I think she was getting desperate because she looked at me and said, "Well, OK" and she hired me. So I was expected to get up early in the morning and clean the house, the whole house, dust it and vacuum twice a week, and squeeze three glasses of orange juice before I went to school. And then I would take the bus all the way around. Because now I lived far away from school and this bus would go all the way downtown and around in the U shape and up to where my school was. Then after school at three thirty, I would have to turn around and go back. And then I would have to do the laundry and the ironing, and watch the kids and help cook. After that, serve them, and clean up the kitchen and eat the leftovers. And that was the thing that bothered me the most. I don't know how many of you have people that serve you but I can tell you that was a blow to me as a fourteen year old. To have to eat leftovers, that was the hard part for me.

In the meantime I would visit my father and he started getting stronger, and started to get up once the six weeks were over. He went back to his job as a dishwasher. I stayed working until father went back to Portland. And he said, "Well, now when the spring comes, I'm going back to Portland to see if I can get a business." He did go back to Portland—he found a business that was—he didn't have enough money for it so he cashed his insurance policy and some other funds. And the thing that bothered him the most was he had to borrow some money. That was something that was very difficult for him, but he had a close friend who wouldn't tell anybody that he borrowed some money.

And so he cobbled together to buy this very, very run down hotel in Portland and if you know the Tenderloin and have been in the worst hotel there that would be ours. Our rooms had no running water, had no toilets; they were down the hall. I think the building was built in the 1860's or something like that, but it still had gas jets in the hallways with the raw light bulbs hanging down. Well, we moved into this hotel and I was not a happy camper there either. I was so looking forward to going to Portland because I had some friends back there, but this hotel, was just not my idea of a home. After we had lived in a very nice place before the war, we lived actually outside the zone where most of the Japanese people lived and it was quite nice. After we were there for about a month or so, the health inspector and the fire inspector came. They condemned the hotel, so he was busy then trying to get everything up to code, and they gave him like thirty days to get everything up to code.

He had to change I think, five or six sinks that had Tallinn new line linoleum. The door checks and the fire door checks didn't work. We had to have those fixed, he had to get new stoves in all the rooms, and mattress covers. And we didn't have any furniture in our apartment. We had beds and a kitchen table but nothing in the living room. So it was OK, we sat on boxes and so all the supplies that came in; such as the stoves, and everything were in our living rooms, and the roles of linoleum, I remember that. We would walk over these things as father, he worked alone, was trying to get this place up to code.

At this point, my father was sixty years old, a time when most men and women are thinking about retirement. He had to start all over again. So he was doing all of that, he was a clerk during the daytime and at the nighttime. They would come in at two o' clock in the morning when the bars closed. He got very little sleep, and then we would have a crisis, one after another. The health inspector and fire inspector would come back. Finally, the health inspector said everything was OK. But, the fire inspector was really the devil. He would come in and say, you have to change all those meter locks. My father would say, “But, no gas is leaking!”. The fire inspector would say, “I don't care. You have to change them!” All these little minor things, and I think he would have kept coming back every month had it not been for the fact that they changed inspectors. Finally, this new inspector came and he said, “Ah, everything's fine, OK”. So, immediately all of our cash flow went back into the hotel. We were just barely making it and then we would have—one of our tenants would drink too much and smoke a cigarette and the mattress would catch on fire and someone would come knocking on our door, “Fire, fire, there's a fire!” We'd all get up and it was really a very tense, very difficult time.

And, the other thing was that I was in high school by then, so you can probably identify with this, wanting to have cloths and have things that the other kids had, it was very difficult because I made—fortunately, I could sew so I made my own skirts and some other things. But, I wanted a Cashmere sweater like the other girls had and Pendleton skirts or whatever—I had saddle shoes. But, I wanted to dress like them and it was difficult because at that point I couldn't have those sorts of things except if I could work it in with going to a sale, or getting something. And then the last part was that my father worked so hard and he said in three years he said our cash flow will be good enough so that we can move to a better place and things will be a little easier for us. Well, when the third year came he had a massive heart attack, so he couldn't work anymore.