<Begin Segment 14>

DN: Did you, so anyway, the... you were, so that was what you were doing when this all started to go down. And were you still in pretty close touch with your Nisei friends?

EH: Well, let's see... I don't remember where Jerry was. And Tom Kitayama and Ray, his brother, they, they went on to Washington State. And let's see, who else? Keto, he was going to, he became a pharmacist, and was going to Washington, the UW. And Lefty, I don't know whatever happened to him. And Sada went back east, or, no, that was after the war that he went back there and went to school.

DN: You, you're kind of mentioning these names, and lot of 'em I'm, or, can you give, tell us the full names?

EH: Full names? Sada Omoto, Keto Okazaki, and Tom Kitayama, and Lefty Katayama. There's a, was a Kitayama and a Katayama. No relations.

DN: And they, these were your buds?

EH: Yeah, they were in our class. 'Cause you're more, well, they were the closest to us. So you kind of hung on to them.

DN: Uh-huh. So they weren't, they weren't there at the dock that day? At, on March 30th. They were in school, a lot of 'em, it sounds like.

EH: No. No, lot of the, well, they took all the kids out of school.

DN: No, I mean, in college. Several of them...

EH: Oh, in college?

DN: Yeah.

EH: Well, Tom was the only one, Tom Kitayama was the only one that I can name right off, to truthfully say where he was. And he was at Washington State, so, and Sada, I don't remember where he was. See, he lived out on the north end of the Island, and that was kind of the other end of town, so to speak. [Laughs]

DN: Right. So you, how, how far was the dock from your home at the time?

EH: Less than a mile.

DN: Short walk then?

EH: Yeah.

DN: And was this a Saturday morning, or was it, was it a non-working day?

EH: Well, I was working, and I, I was working for Emmanuel Olson, and I was on the delivery route. And boat was to leave at 11 o'clock, I think. And I had the route out there. I says, "I'm gonna take time off, you can dock me, whatever you want, but I'm going to see my Japanese friends off." And that's when they run me up, out in the field out there, and, "You stay out there."

DN: So you, you came down to the dock to see them off, and you were told to stay away.

EH: Yeah. Couldn't, couldn't see 'em. We could, from where we stood, we could see them walking down, or unloading from the trucks, and then walking down on the dock. But...

DN: You had this bad feeling, it sounds like, just because there had been military presence on the Island for about a week and half already.

EH: Yeah.

DN: So what, what thoughts went through your head as you were watching all that?

EH: Well, at first, it was, it was thought that it would be just the immigrants that would be taken away, and the kids born here would be able to stay. But it didn't work out that way. And... you know, when I was working -- I worked six days a week in the store, and we didn't get through until six o'clock at night. So there wasn't too much -- well, the Kitayama family, they, they were close by the Pleasant Beach store. So they would come into the store periodically, so we could see them. But Tom, Tom was not there. His younger brother Ray, I know he would come in, and his sisters. And can't remember the name of the sisters. Hmm. But that, they were the Kitayamas, anyway. But they had, they, they were, oh, very, very close to the store. Well, actually, the owner of the store owned the property that they were leasing from. They had the greenhouses.

DN: Uh-huh. When you were, when they were being loaded onto the docks, though, what, what kind of thoughts went through your head? Were they...

EH: Well, everybody was crying, you know, and I've been trying... you see, there's so many of the older people that are gone, and I've been trying to find out who else was there. And Gina Ritchie, she's the only, only other one that I know of, and she's got Alzheimer's, so it wouldn't do any good to ask her. But the rest of 'em, they weren't there.

DN: Did, when you... and my understanding is that the, when the Japanese were being loaded on, they were being pretty brave, putting a brave face on it. There wasn't a lot of...

EH: Well, like the one girl said at one of the meetings for the park, the girl that sat next to me, she says -- she was much younger than us -- and she said, "Oh, we're going on a vacation." [Laughs] Well, that's what their, I think her parents had told her. So she was quite happy about it until they, they got down there and it was no picnic. Pick out your straw to make, they gave you a mattress cover, and you went and got straw to make a mattress, and that's what you slept on.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.