<Begin Segment 7>

TI: And earlier you mentioned that some people had visitors at Santa Anita. Did your family or did you ever have a visitor?

MT: Yeah. Surprisingly, this, my father's partner and their family, 'cause we lived at their house after the war started, my father was taken December 7th at 8:30 in the evening and I, in about October of 1941 they FBI came and interrogated him.

TI: Yeah, we got that story earlier, so --

MT: So on, when the war started he was immediately taken away, so we moved to, when the, when my father's partner got moved away, arrested because of his relationship with my father, nothing else, then his wife called my mother and said, why don't you come live with us, because my mother was in charge of the company and she had to go to the, sign checks and do other things. So my mother, we moved into the Seinan area, Twenty-Seventh and Arlington in Los Angeles, and the wife was a Nisei, so she drove my mother everywhere. And so when we went to camp, when we went to Santa Anita they had moved, in order, they told her that if she moved to Zone Two -- there was Zone One and Zone Two -- in that area of California, then her husband could come out. So he came out, so they moved to Orosi. You write it Orosi, but you pronounce it Orosa. Near...

TI: Tulare?

MT: Tulare. Tulare, out that way, central, south central, south of Fresno. He came out, and we were in Santa Anita when they were notified that they had to go to Poston. And they said, they voluntarily said, we want to go to Santa Anita because there're relatives of ours -- we're distant relatives, but we are relatives -- and so they came to Santa Anita and they lived in one of the barracks, not in the stables. Well, they were, they had friends in Los Angeles and we became friends with them, neighbors, and so they, they came to visit us, the Shintanis and us, and we would go there. One of the fellows was Filipino. He was a retired chief in the navy, wonderful man, Mr. Milo we called him. He just, that's his last name, wonderful man, nice. I could imagine that if the other Filipino people found that he was coming to visit us that they would've been very upset with him, but he didn't care. He drove to see us. And we would ask them to buy things for us, whether it's food or different things, and they would buy for us and give it to us, things that were not contrabands, of course. And so that's what we did. By the way, the contrabands that they took were knives too, any knife over five inches, I think it was, and that means sewing scissors were confiscated. Anyway, he would bring us things. And so other people had other people visiting them, so it was okay and they were, as long as they didn't bring in contraband they would visit us.

TI: And when they visited were you separated or anything, or was it just like they would be allowed in?

MT: There would be across the table from us. Just across the table, no, no windows that they, that I remember. Maybe they did later, I don't know. After the riot they may have done something. I don't know.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.