<Begin Segment 28>

AI: And tell me about that day, about December 7th. What do you recall about that day?

PB: Well, most of us were down in Kent. We were in our Kent farm, and we were planting these little onion bulbs, and Dad had made an implement where, makes a bunch of little holes at one time, and we would take these onions, little onion bulbs and stick 'em in the hole, push 'em down in the hole. And we were working, and my brother Tom had been up to Evergreen, our other farm, and he drove down in the pickup truck and as he, we could always tell, because he always had the radio going so loud that we said, well, "Here comes Tom." But he rolled the window down, and he says Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. So, of course, I told my dad right away, and Dad says, "Oh, not, not Pearl Harbor. Not the Hawaiian islands." He said, "You mean the Philippines." And he just kept on working nonchalantly, and I said, "Oh, we got to go find out. Let's go and find out if that's true." So we dropped everything, went to the house, and Tom already had the radio on in the house. And, of course, when they said, "War," and all Japanese were going to be rounded up, well, it really scared us then, because here we had the three farms, and the horses and the trucks and everything we owned, and we didn't know what was going to happen. He had talked about they were gonna deport us or they were gonna put us in prison, or we didn't know what was gonna happen. It was really upsetting then.

AI: Well, so what did you do that winter, because in December, as you were saying, you're getting ready for the next coming season. Did you continue doing some of that planting, the onions and the other crops?

PB: Well, I think... I don't remember just what we did do, but, of course, the onions started growing, and we had planted lettuce, and the lettuce was just about heading by, just about the time war, or about the time that we were going to be interned. And when they said that we couldn't go any further than eight miles -- within the radius of eight miles -- of course, our farms weren't that far apart so we could work on the farms, but it was very, very trying because we had no idea what was going to happen. And Hank wanted to get married and go to a "free zone," 'cause he didn't want to go to camp. He says, "I'm not going to camp." So he and Martie got married, and they left for Wenatchee. But my mother was very disappointed in him because he's the first son, and she thought, well, he'd be the one that would say, "Well, the family's got to stay together," and everything, and here, he just got married and took off and left us. He just left everything up to Emily, my youngest sister, she and I were trying to keep the main farm together, get everything together, and of course, the important thing was to have money. We had to have money to survive, so we were trying to sell everything, and sell for whatever we could get. We were selling plants and flowers and trees and everything we can sell. And it was a horrible time because each day, it just seemed like we were being squeezed. And since we'd never been in a war before, in our lives, it was just absolutely panic. We, I still have nightmares. I have nightmares quite often, trying to decide, "What am I going to take? What am I gonna do with everything?" and, "What's going to happen to us?" It was just a horrible, horrible time.

AI: So, you didn't really have, there wasn't any explanation about what was going to happen, but you heard a lot of rumors?

PB: Well, they said we were, we might be deported, or we might be just... well, we didn't know what to expect. It was totally a time of panic that we couldn't imagine what was gonna happen.

AI: Well, since you had known some people in California, I was wondering, did you hear anything about, I think it was in February, when the Japanese families on Terminal Island down there were removed? Did you recall anything about, hearing about that?

PB: Well, the only thing we knew, that people that were head of some organization or something, they were rounded up first. And I guess they just come right out and picked up people here and there, if you were, belonged to a language school, or if you were an instructor in a language school, or if you were president of a Japanese organization, or Japanese school or anything like that, they just come out and picked you up and took you away, and you didn't even know. Fortunately, my dad wasn't into anything like that, we were just farmers, so we were together. But having the three farms, it was terrible because we're thinking, another week, and we'll be able to harvest lettuce and onions were all coming up, now we could harvest the onions. But we just didn't know from day to day, it was just absolutely terrible.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.