page 11 of 11
Play MovieMay 15, 2007 - Part 5 of 5
Section below transcribed by Joseph Werhan (intern).
Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.
After Topaz
Did you ever get in contact with your family before you went into internment? That is a long period of not being able to talk to them. Were you able to talk to them before you were interned? Were you able to contact your family before you were in interned?
My family in Japan?
Yeah.
Not before I was interned—no communication there.
Not during, but after Pearl Harbor and before your internment, you weren't able to?
Not after Pearl Harbor, no. Not until the war was over.
So they didn't know that you were being interned?
I don't know if they knew or not. They probably heard about Japanese being put into camps, so they probably knew that I was in a camp, but they don't know where.
Did you ever talk to them about it? How did they feel about you being interned?
After I went back they asked me about it and I talked about what happened to us. I told them that all of our money was tied up and we couldn't make any money or anything. We had a hard time after we got out of camp to get on our feet. It took us about—on the average—ten years. Ten years it took the nisei to get on their feet. Whether they were able to buy a T.V. set, get refrigerators, buy a car, and get a house—to live a normal life it took the nisei about ten years. That's just about what it took us.
We came back to here—California—in 1955. Until then, we first went to New York. We were there until after camp until 1945 and then from there we went to Chicago in 1948. We stayed there and that's when I got this union job. I got decent pay, but then the factory moved outside. They were in the city when I got the job. Then they moved to the outskirts so I had to commute. In those days they didn't have the freeways so I had to commute by car going through the city streets in Chicago. It took me about an hour to an hour and a half to get out there. I started looking for a house because I said commuting is too rough because I come home at sometimes seven o'clock. When it snowed I didn't come home until nine or nine-thirty because the roads get slick with the snow and you can't drive fast. The cars are stalled because they can't move and they just leave it there. You’re driving in and out—in and out of these things. It took me sometimes two hours—two and a half hours to get home.
Was there any reason that you didn't return to California after the internment?
Well that was the reason—because I couldn't get a house out there.
Out in California?
Yeah, I would look in the papers and I would find one in the papers and I would telephone them. They'd say, "Sure, come on out." I'd asked if it was available even. I go out there and when I open the door you could see their mouth drop. And then they'd say, "Oh, we sold it already.” You know darn well that's discrimination.
You felt more discrimination in California?
When we came back here it was the same thing—it was amazing. For about a year or a year and a half, every weekend we went out. My little daughter must have been about six and a half then. We were going out there and when we came home she said, "It's not fair, they don't sell us a house.” That's the way it was. After doing that for so long my wife's sister came back and she said that I could get a job back here—there were job openings as a machinist. I could get housing too she thought. So we all bundled up and I came back here on our vacation. By that time Chiz's mother and father had come back and they had this hotel that their lawyer kept for them. So when they came back they took over the apartment. He had income from that. The money that was made before went to the lawyers, he didn't get that part. He came home and because he got that income he was able to buy a house. He bought a house and paid the down payment for it and started paying for it.
When we came back—I guess because of the father's situation—Chizu's sister must have thought that it was okay that we could find houses. But when we came back and we looked around it was the same story as Chicago. You phone and they say, "Okay, come on over,” then you go over and they see you and they say, "Sorry." One of them was honest enough and said, "I'm sorry but we're under an agreement that we won't sell to non-whites. I don't want to get into trouble so I don't want to sell it.” That sort of thing happened. Eventually we found a place up Orchard hill over here. The workers who came here to build ships—well the war was over and they had to move out, so they moved out and there were openings there. So nisei moved over and then some openings nearby opened too. That's why we got in. A lot of places opened up so we got there and we were there for about two years. Then the children were getting big and we only had three bedrooms. The boys slept separately but the girls had to sleep together. We thought we would try to get separate rooms for the girls.
We started looking for a house and Chiz's sister was in real estate so we asked her to look. She was looking around—she couldn't find anything. We waited year, we waited two years, and so I said, “Forget it, the children are going to grow up and they're going to leave the house pretty soon so we won't need a big house.” We just gave up on it when Chiz's sister came over and said she has a couple of houses that she thought we might be interested in, “Do you want to come over and look at them?” Chizu and I said, "Okay" and we went over and we looked at houses. There was a house at the bottom of our street—right at the bottom—but that was one of those “railroad houses.” One room lined together—no room in the back so you come into one room and you can walk out in to the backyard. So I said, "Oh no, not this.”
We went up to the top where we are now and we walked inside and opened the door and went inside. Chiz walked over by the window and she said, "Oh I like this” because it's a nice view.” We negotiated and this couple were teachers—both retired—and they had bought another house up in Whiskey Town. They were paying two mortgages so they wanted to get rid of this. They asked for a certain price and I said, "Well, it's kind of hard for us." I asked them to come down to a certain amount—the amount that we could get from there [gestures: their current house] and put that as a down payment. At first they said, "No, it's too hard" then they called back and said okay they'll do it. That's how we got that—we got that at a bargain—at thirty-three. Thirty-three-five we paid and we got that house. Now it's more than ten times that.
That's how we got this house. We moved in on the day that we were going on our trip to Japan. We had agreed on our trip before we had negotiated this thing. When they said okay we had to move everything—we dumped everything in these rooms. We left everything and went to Japan and came back. Then we had to rearrange everything—it was a mess. That's how we got this house. Since then we've changed a little. We put up paneling, and we repainted the thing. I put in new windows over there, and downstairs we put in different things. So we made it into fairly a decent place. The children could play downstairs and we had three bedrooms.
Was California different after you came back?
Yeah, it was. We weren't working when we were in California before the war so we didn't know it too well. It seemed a lot better, at least we knew that a lot of nisei could get jobs. A lot of them came back and got jobs around here in different places like San Diego and San Jose—a lot of them went to San Jose—and got jobs there, and in San Francisco. Jobs opened up so it became easier for nisei to come up here and buy houses. They could afford decent places.
Did you ever return to your old home, the one that you had before internment?
No, very few returned to the old homes because they didn't own them. They couldn't own homes before the war—they usually leased them or rented it so when they came back they didn't have any. There were maybe a couple of them who were able to buy it under their children's names because they were citizens, but there were very few.
Did you ever reconnect with any of the Nisei Young Democrat members, when you came back to California?
We scattered. I guess in a sense we kept in contact. I knew one of the couples went to Washington DC, a couple went down to Los Angeles, a couple went to Detroit—they scattered. We really didn't work together anymore. There were just Christmas cards—that's about all we started. But there are a couple here. Anne Howden—she was married to a nisei and divorced and came back and married Ed Howden. He was the secretary of one of the offices in the California government [executive secretary of the CCFEP]. He was one of the secretaries—he married her. We were in contact with her a lot—they were in San Francisco—but she passed away recently. We went to her funeral. Ed just sent us another card thanking us for going down there. Another one was Kenny Murase. He was a professor at the University of California, San Francisco [Correction: San Francisco State University]. I think he's retired now. [Kenji Murase passed away in 2009] So those are the couple of nisei that are around here. Another one over in East Oakland—Taro Katayama—used to be an editor of a paper. He passed away—his wife is still here. She is a Young Democrat. There were a couple others here but they passed away now. There are a few around but we're all getting old, so you'll find fewer and fewer. I am getting so old now I hardly know anybody my age. There isn't anybody around.
Life After Camp—Civil Rights
Are any of your children involved with civil rights?
Oh yeah, they're all involved in one way or another. Patty incidentally—when she was going to Cal—was in the student's movement there. In fact, cops threw her down the stairs on one occasion because she participated in it. One time when she was participating in a demonstration they picked her up and sent her to jail. She was out at the—what's the jail out here near Pleasanton? They put her in there and they didn't know where to put her because she's small—tiny—and what kind of a job to give her. She asked for gardening but they put her in laundry. They thought she was Chinese, so they put her in laundry. She did laundry work. We used to go out and visit her everyday because we wanted to make sure that she was treated right. We would go up there and I would ask—in front of the caretakers—“Do they treat you right?” She was treated all right—even the people inside treated her well. She's small, I'm guessing that's why. She's involved in it. The others are not involved that much. Their ideas are the same, but they are not involved in the work. The youngest daughter is in public broadcasting so I guess you can say that she got involved there a little bit.
Do you think your daughter was involved with civil rights because of your influence?
Oh yeah, sure. She got more involved than a lot of kids do. She used to go on marches with us, and I'd carry her on my shoulder and take her into these marches. When I got tired I would let her walk a little. After she walked she would grab my legs and say, "I'm tired." So I pick her up and put her on my shoulder and walk again. We would take her to conferences and she would sit by the stage—we would give her some paper and some crayons and she would do coloring and things like that while we were at the conference. She was a good child—she never cried or anything—and she went to all of these affairs with us. We went to square dance and she would square dance with us on the side of us. She would be dancing along on the side and people would smile at her. She got a lot more involved than the others, even from when she was a child.
You describe being a progressive and a liberal going back to when you were seventeen or eighteen years old. Could you tell us any stories of your early interest of being politically active, going back to the earliest years?
Well my earliest year would be about twenty or twenty-one because it was after I came back to America and started to go to Cal. It's only when I started to go to Cal that my eyes were opened up. When I started I met Young Democrats. Oh, another thing that came to my mind. I met this little nisei girl passing pamphlets at Sailor Gate. That interested me because this was a nisei, she looked nisei, I thought she was Japanese. She was a nisei. I went up and looked at her thing and she was talking about the rights of Negros to vote in the South, and that we should petition the government to allow them voting. I started talking to her and I found out that she was a communist and she was a nisei. That interested me because a nisei, to become a Communist—that's real far left. I talked to her and that was another eye opener. Things like that didn't occur to me because it's nothing that I continued on. Things like that happened too—that was my eye opener really—around that period. I must have been about twenty-two or so already. Yeah, about twenty-two, but I caught on fast though.
Telling His Story
Earlier you mentioned something about the influence of your father on your political career.
My father and mother both weren't involved politically in anything. During the talks and things they influenced me. My mother would say, “Seigi no tameni.” Seigi means righteousness—that you should fight for righteousness and not hurt people who are down. My father was of the same type. He would talk to me and say things like “seigi.” Seigi is about the same thing—the right road or the straight road—that I should follow the straight road and do things for other people generally. They talked like that so although they weren't political, at least the ideas sank in. I guess that is where the ideas came from. I can't think of anything else because they weren't politically involved. It was only these occasional talks and the way they treated other people that influenced me. We lived up on the hilly part, and down below by the seaside was a little village where there were people who were Japanese, but they aren't looked upon as Japanese. It's like the Ainu's—Ainu's are also originally Japanese but they were pushed up—because they were involved in killing cattle and things of that sort. You are not supposed to hurt cattle because they are looked upon—from a Buddhist point of view—as sacred animals. To get meat they used these people to do it. They ate the meat but they used these people and then they segregate them. They say they are not human beings. They were segregated and they went to segregated schools but—sometime before I got back to Japan—they began to bring them into regular schools. There were kids in the school that I went to that came from there.
One time I got in a fight with one of the kids—I forgot what the fight was over—and he hit me with his guitar. He swung it at me and hit me in the face and it swelled up. I beat him up so when people heard about it they said, “Oh, you are going to get it. The people from down there are going to come up to your place and they're gonna raise heck with your parents.” Nothing happened, my father never said anything about it. My father never said anything against those people either. He would say, “Leave them alone, treat them like any other people.” That was something that came down to me—at least I didn't discriminate against them and I guess the same thought came to me when they talked about the Negros here—that same situation.
Do you have any regrets or anything that you would change? Do you have any regrets about some of the actions you did?
I don't know what you are asking, I'm sorry.
Did you ever regret doing anything?
Regret? Well I guess there are a lot of things that I regret doing but they're not anything big.
Did you regret coming to America?
No, not anything like that. Nothing that is big that I regretted. Only regrets are some of the little things that you're doing and say, "I shouldn't have done that. I regret doing it." Nothing big that I can think of.
Do you think your life would be a lot different if you had stayed in Japan?
It sure would be different. I think it would be different, yeah. As my aunt in Japan used to say when I was over there—she called me butchon, butchong means—what do you call a son that is brought up you protected?
Did you say protected? Like sheltered?
Yeah, a sheltered child she called me. That's why my grades were good, she says. No, it was reversed. My grades were good so I am a sheltered child she was saying. I would have ended up that way if I had stayed in Japan. I guess I wouldn't have had to struggle so much.
What are some of your tips for living such a long and wonderful life?
I don't know. Do everything in moderation is about it. Don't try anything that you know is not good for you. Like smoking, for example. Today everyone should know that smoke is not good for you. So why smoke? If someone still smokes after knowing that then they're dumb if you ask me. And drinking is the same thing.
Do you have a final message for future generations?
No, I don't have any. I can't tell anyone else what to do. From my experience I know that you have to be just. In other words you have to believe in human rights—civil rights—the rights of others as well as your own. I think you have to live that way if you want to live in this world—you're not living alone so you have to think of others in this world. I guess that is about all that I can say. It's up to you. You have to make up your mind on how you are going to live and if you decide to live that way I think you live a happier life. I know Chiz and I have. We had a hard life because financially we had a hard time for a while after camp, but after both of us started work we were able to manage. We are able to get along now—our retirement isn't bad. I hope that I don't get sick and laid up—that's the thing I'm worried about—because I don't want to spend all that money on sickness. I sure don't want to put Chiz into any kind of a difficulty.
Thank you so much.
