Densho Digital Archive
Topaz Museum Collection
Title: Ted Nagata Interview
Narrator: Ted Nagata
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Date: June 3, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-nted-01-0008

TN: Well, my mother had a very hard time in Topaz, and the stress of incarceration and being called the enemy, and why was the government doing this? She was a college person, so she knew her rights. It just affected her to the point where she couldn't carry on. She never did recover from that. So my mother was a real casualty of Topaz, and I'm sure there were many others, too.

MA: How did that sort of affect you? I mean, you were a young child at that point.

TN: Right. Well, it made my sister and I grow up fairly fast because without our mother to help us, we had to learn and do many things ourselves, and many things we went without. I mean, like brushing our teeth every day and taking a bath every day, some of those kinds of things we lost out on, because we didn't have people pushing us to do it every day. And even after the war, when we came to Salt Lake, we were, my sister and I were put into an orphanage because my father couldn't quite handle us and finding a job and trying to find a place to live.

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