<Begin Segment 10>

MN: Now, your parents made an arrangement with a Mrs. Hertz.

BK: Mrs. Hearst.

MN: Hearst. What was the arrangement during the war with her?

BK: I wasn't aware of the details except what I surmised afterwards. I know that she came and lived in the house and didn't pay any rent. She could rent the rooms and keep the rent and we would have to pay for the expenses, so she stayed at the house and paid nothing, all expenses. But she was to look after the house. I mean, nobody had any choice. We had to get someone to take over and look after things. There was no one left amongst our Japanese friends. Everybody had to leave. And I don't know how she came to be the contact for our family, but that was determined by my father and older sister. So she stayed at the house for three years, rent free, and kept the money. When we came back at least we had the house, and the, we had paid the utilities with the money that we made in Manzanar, so she didn't pay for anything. I found that out. I says, well, what could you do? There was no choice at that time.

MN: Your dad had a lot of Japanese medical books. What did he do with that before going into camp?

BK: Oh, yes. My dad, as I told you, was a medical student and graduated with the medical school in Kumamoto, and he had brought a lot of the medical books from Japan. He had them sent over. And they were written in German, because at that time Japan had no knowledge of medicine or methods of treating people. They were in the Dark Ages. So we had medical books that were written in German that we had to destroy as part of the holdings of my parents, and anything else that had Japanese words, we were burning it up. The back incinerator was busy. I was tearing out the books, my sister was stoking the fire, and we burned everything up. There was nothing left. That was a state of panic at that time.

MN: What was going through your mind at this time while you were doing this? You're fifteen years old, you're a teenager.

BK: We didn't know anything about relations between countries. My father and I didn't communicate. He spoke a little English, but very little. It was mostly Nihongo with his friends. My mother was not very conversive in English, and so my contact was mostly with my peers. And so whatever was going on as far as the war was concerned we had no appreciation for, except the fact that we were Japanese and we were being sent out of school, gonna be sent out of the state. And we had no identity really, so we were at a loss and just had to go with what was told for us to do. We had no control.

MN: Well, how did you decide what to bring to, to camp? You're told you can only carry --

BK: Yeah, you were told what you could carry and you only could take what you could carry, and so my dad went down to the famous department store and bought the biggest suitcases you could buy. So they said you could carry one suitcase and he got the biggest for each one of us, and that's what we packed, was our clothes and whatever we were gonna take. Each one was entitled to one. And then I carried my cornet in my hand, and that was, that was it. There was not too much leeway, what you could take. Mostly clothing. What else? Couldn't take, pack a lot of food.

MN: So your parents didn't tell you... why didn't you leave your coronet? It's not very practical.

BK: No, they didn't say anything. At that time was panic time. You just try to make sure everybody had clothes and... we didn't know where we were gonna go.

MN: Did your family go straight to Manzanar or did you go to an assembly center?

BK: No, we went straight to Manzanar.

MN: How did you get there?

BK: We went down there to Little Tokyo and, down by whatever street it is where the train, train came. What is that street? When you go down Second Street, go down all, all the way to the river almost. You run into the square tracks. I don't know, it's...

MN: Alameda? No, you're going more east of Alameda?

BK: Yeah. Where is it, the, what street is it? The... I don't know what the street name was, but it's like Turner Street or something like that, and that's where the train came by. And that's where the train, you could get on the train there. It was like the train station. So that's where we, we got onto the train, and then it left there to go up to Manzanar. Yeah.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.