<Begin Segment 11>

AI: Well, now when did you first start hearing that you might be evacuated, that you might have, be forced to leave?

LK: There were rumors, oh, from January on. I remember talking with my brother going to school and he said, "Well, I guess..." -- you see, by then he was almost eighteen and my sister was two years older so we figured that we can run the grocery store if my mother and dad -- naturally we expected just the aliens to be taken. And he said, "Well, we can manage," you know, we thought we could. And my sister was in New York going to music school so she'd have to come home.

AI: Oh, now tell me about that, when, when had she gone and where did, where did she go?

LK: She went to Juilliard Institute and she was quite accomplished pianist, so she was able to enter there and my parents paid all her expenses and...

AI: Oh, my.

LK: She lived at an International House which was like a boarding school -- a house where they, all these international students went to school. So she was able to get in there and she made a lot of nice friends. She had the luxury of living out in New York and she was there for two years because the war came along. And after we were interned -- well, luckily she got her teaching degree and then she came back and joined us inside the camp.

AI: Oh, I see, so she was already in New York.

LK: She was.

AI: And she was finishing up her studies there at Juilliard and in the meantime, here you were in Seattle not sure what was going to happen, trying to make some decisions about if your parents were taken, how you would manage with the store.

LK: So we thought that between the three of us -- I was not quite sixteen yet, I was fifteen when Pearl Harbor happened. So we figured that with having helped in the grocery store from long ago we could do it, you know. And so I remember talking with my brother about that and never did we think that we as citizens would be incarcerated. But much to our surprise, I think, I think it was February or so that the rumors really got strong and then sure enough, by March the first group was sent from or removed from Bainbridge Island and then we didn't get any notice or, or order or anything in the mail or, served to us. I work in the legal profession, so I know that you know, you have to -- those things are very, have to be carried out very religiously and you have to be subpoenaed and so forth. But we didn't get any kind of notice like that. They posted a sign saying that certain, from, from Yesler to Twelfth Avenue and, they'd map out the boundaries. You report at such a time, and such and such a place for evacuation. That was the way we had to go. And just because we were a very obedient society, we did what we were told.

AI: So you saw these signs posted out on the street. That's how you found out. And what did you and your family do to get ready? How much time did you have to get things in order?

LK: Well, I think maybe we were -- we were forewarned because we were, didn't have, we weren't among the first that had to leave. I remember going down and saying goodbye to a lot of my friends who were leaving before me. But the meantime we were trying to sell our grocery store and sell our car and things like that. And naturally we were totally exploited. My parents almost gave up on selling the grocery store. They just figured they're just gonna give away all the groceries that were on the shelves and... but then luckily we found somebody that would buy it, and they gave us a token amount for that. I think it was $2,000 for the whole store. [Laughs]

AI: For everything in it?

LK: Yeah, and then my dad by then had put in a lot of refrigeration and, you know, ice cream coolers and all that. Electric slicing machine and all that. So he, he lost a lot of money and... but I, I just kind of, $2,000 kind of penetrates my mind.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.