<Begin Segment 38>

TI: Okay, so describe, so here you could only take what you could carry, so you have your stuff, did you, were you picked up at the front of your house or did you have to walk someplace, what was that, what happened then?

HH: Well, we knew that we were not going to... we didn't know, but they said that, "You should all assemble down at the foot of the Nineteenth Avenue," because that's where we had to take the train, Union Station. Well, that's when we kind of starting worrying, how come, to go to Puyallup, why are we taking a train? But anyway, we were all prepared with whatever we can carry and suitcase and everything, so we just left the front door and just didn't lock it or anything, just left. And we walked down the hill, it's about four blocks or so, kind of a fairly steep hill, but we walked straight down, and right into Union Station, train station.

TI: Can you recall that walk down, anything that happened or anything?

HH: Oh, yes, one thing that I could remember, well, I did take a look back once, about halfway down. I just took one final look, nobody else did. And then my dad, I remember him saying, "You know, when I came from Japan, I had only one suitcase." He says, "I have two now." And like he wasn't worried about whatever else he couldn't take with him, but he just mentioned the fact that he now has two suitcases instead of one, so he had an extra suitcase. And it was kind of a surprise for me, how he took the evacuation and leaving everything behind and just two suitcases that he was carrying out.

TI: So when you heard that, when you heard your father say, "I came with one suitcase, I'm leaving now with two suitcases," you said you were surprised. I mean, what were you thinking when you heard that?

HH: Well, it did strike me kind of a feeling that, well, this is how Issei, and not only my dad, but they had several things that they didn't tell me about various things. One of 'em was that the determination and all this, how we should live our lives, and like if you can't, don't resist anything, but yield like a bamboo and things like that. But this is something that you can't help, shikata ga nai. It just means, well, just leave it that way, can't be helped, so just don't worry about it, just take it in that kind of way. It was amazing how Issei, with just the education that they had, just at an early age, that's all he had, because he came when he was sixteen years old. So it's just amazing to me how Issei were able to persevere and things like that.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.