<Begin Segment 23>

TI: Now, do you recall any special preparations? Eventually you would get the orders that you would have to leave. Do you recall any special preparations that you did for the house, the farm, the store?

MY: No, not really. My sister-in-law and I went to help register several groups of people from O'Brien and Kent and then our area. (Narr. note: Mom worked in the field until the day we left.)

TI: So describe that. I mean, to register, so these are the Issei you would help?

MY: Yeah, well, all the families, you know.

TI: So you'd go pick them up and bring 'em to...

MY: No, they found their way to wherever they were registered. But I says, "Gee whiz, we got to sit here and register these people to leave and we got to register ourselves?" By that time, I think we were all pretty tough. We knew what was gonna happen, so we just had to take what was coming.

TI: Well, for you to register, was this something that you were paid to do?

MY: No. It was all free.

TI: Oh, so you just volunteered to help out.

MY: Yeah.

TI: And why did you? Why did you decide to...

MY: I don't know. Just because... I don't know, because it was the right thing to do, I guess. Somebody had to do it.

TI: And you mentioned your sister-in-law, so this is Tom's wife?

MY: Yeah. Well, George's wife was there, too. George had just gotten married in November, November the 4th or something like that. And here this is December 7th, and we didn't know what was gonna happen. So they lived in Kent, across the bridge, which was beyond the limit for us, so we got them, and they packed up everything and we moved everything over to the house.

TI: When families came in to register, how did that, I mean, describe that. What happened when people registered?

MY: Well, I think you get to the point where, it was like they say, "Shikata ga nai," huh? You just got to go with the flow and hope the best comes out of it. And just resign yourself to what the consequences are, and what else can you do? There's 110,000 Japanese and how many million Caucasians, and if anybody wanted to raise a stink, well, what kind of chance to do you have against the rest of the population? And so...

TI: So it sounds like, in general, people just sort of went along with it, did what they had to do, and just...

MY: Hope that it turns out for the best. It's like this Caucasian family that lives next door, he was a retired railroad engineer, I mean, a conductor. And so Mom would be out there in the garden or something, and he'd come over and he'd say, "Hi, Mom, you're doing pretty good." He says, "These people should have a good look at you. They could never get rid of you when they come and watch you working." But nobody came, of course. He says, "They can't, they can't put you away anyplace." He says, "This place would fall apart," which it did eventually. So they were, a lot of them realized what, the actuality of the thing, and then there were the "anti-Japs" that were there, they didn't care what the consequence was going to be, they just, "Get 'em out of here." So, the ones that took over stuff, I guess they did pretty well that year. Because almost everything was ready to harvest by the time we were leaving. But then all went downhill because they didn't remember how to start next year.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright (c) 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.