Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Hank Shozo Umemoto Interview
Narrator: Hank Shozo Umemoto
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: July 30, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-uhank-01-0015

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TI: But eventually, up to the last day, so eventually you and your family had to leave. So in terms of family groups, your brother was married, Ben was married, your other brother you mentioned had gone to Oakland, so was it your mother, your two sisters and you were the, that was the family?

HU: Yeah. Right, and so when the war started my brother, his wife and his boy, and my mother, my sister and I were living together. Now Sam, my brother, was in Oakland. He was -- not Oakland, near Oakland, Hayward -- he married into a family who was raising tomatoes, and he married a girl whose father died, so this girl, his, his wife was sort of running the farm. So he went in, he married her and then he had to sort of join the family, work on the farm and I think he was very, very upset about that. He was, even, even, I remember even until he died he was sort of angered about that. Yeah, he was just frustrated.

TI: Now, why, why was he, because he wanted to do something else with his life?

HU: Yeah. Yeah, he didn't want to be a farmer. Yeah, that's what I think, but since he married her, I mean, he was sort of obligated to work on the farm and he just hated farming. And he, he took, he took a correspondence course in refrigeration and he even went to, what was that, Columbus, Columbus, Ohio, and took one month field training there in refrigeration, so he wanted to go into refrigeration and air conditioning business and here he was out on the farm and he was just pissed off and very unhappy. And my second, Miharu-san, my sister, she was married and she was married to another farmer in the Delta, Sacramento Delta region, so (...) when the war started there were just my, my mother's family and my brother's family.

TI: Okay. And so the Florin community is kind of interesting because the people in that area went to several different camps. They all didn't go together as one big group to one place.

HU: Yeah.

TI: But they went to separate places. And so where, where did your group go to?

HU: Okay, we were under -- well actually, the West Coast was divided into, what, 188 exclusion areas and ours was Exclusion Order number 92. It involved 2,500 people in that Sacramento Florin area (...). There were about 325 of us who went to Manzanar directly, and there were, my friends, some of my friends went to Pinedale Assembly Center, and then some of my other friends went to Fresno Assembly Center, and then I think other people, I think they went to Sacramento, the fairgrounds there, and several other places. And Pinedale, it was interesting, last month we went to Yosemite and on the way back we stopped by Fresno Underground Cave Garden and then after the tour, we went on the tour and after the tour the tour guide was talking to us and she was saying that this guy who dug this underground cave-like thing, he had a lot of Japanese friends and when their, the Japanese friends went to Pinedale Assembly Center he sort of took it pretty hard, so he was, so he never, he was from Mediterranean country and he never applied for citizenship as a protest for Japanese going into Pinedale Assembly Center, and I thought that was very --

TI: That's an interesting story, yeah. I never heard that. That's an interesting story. I'll have to talk to the -- so that's the people went from the, went to Pinedale?

HU: Yeah.

TI: Okay. I'll, I'll check into that.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.