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MN: Okay, we're getting a little ahead. We're in, we're talking about after the war, but I'm gonna go back to before the war now.

RW: Okay.

MN: And I wanted to ask you, you had a job before the war, when you were about eleven.

RW: You mean in camp?

MN: No, before the war, in Redlands. Were you working a newspaper, selling?

RW: Oh, yeah. You call that a job? [Laughs] Yeah, well, there were lots of things we did. There was a neighbor across the street had a big truck, and we'd go to some farms and he'd buy watermelon and we'd go out and sell watermelons in downtown on the corner, that type of thing. And then I sold magazines, Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, the Women's Journal, I think, and just a bunch of magazines. I would take 'em over to front of this grocery store and stand there and sell 'em, and the newspapers. I remember one man came by with a camera and he saw me and he said, "Hey, come here. I want to take a movie of you." So then he had me take the Saturday Evening Post and kind of move it around and today when I think about it, he said he was visiting from back East, he probably went back there to show 'em a little Oriental boy looks like. [Laughs] Another guy I remember when I used to sell papers then was the Examiner and the Times, and I said, "Would you like an Examiner or Times?" He says, "Well, I'll let you know what her times is after I examine 'er." He was with his wife or someone. So it was just crude, funny comments, but that's what I was always subjected to as a kid selling things, but people buy, they bought the magazines and bought the papers from me.

MN: Were you selling the newspaper when Pearl Harbor was bombed?

RW: Yeah, but I didn't sell it that day because I pretty much, for the first few days stayed home and stayed in the house. I remember before that Sunday, Pearl Harbor, we had a big picture of Hirohito on a white horse in the living room above the doorway, and when I came home from school the next day after Pearl Harbor there's now a picture of Roosevelt up there and Hirohito's picture's gone. [Laughs] So when I saw that then as a kid, I realized what was going on. But of course, that night, December 7th, I saw my dad outside in the back, he had a fire going where my mother usually heated water for washing clothes, a big tub. He had a fire going there and he had a bunch of stuff, so I went over to see what he was doing. Well, he was chopping up all the heirlooms that they had brought from Japan, the Girls Day dolls -- my mother had a big display of dolls, every Girls Day. We had a big piano and she would set up big boards with a sheet on it, and then she would display dolls. And he was chopping that up, burning those. My older brother and sisters did kendo in San Bernardino and he was burning all that kendo equipment. Pictures, records, my favorite record -- I used to listen to all, my mother had a bunch of march music records from Japan and my favorite was the "Gunkan March." I could just hum that, I could just hear that in my head all the time. It was, and I think that's what put the military in me, was my mom had all these books about military, about Japan, and her brother who was killed in the Japan-Russian War, so she was pretty much into that. But my dad was just burning all that, all the stuff he had that was Japanese, anything had to do with Japan was being demolished. The little pistol I told you about, he stripped that down into little pieces and in that big drainage ditch behind the house, he was throwing the parts in different directions. They were living in fear. It wasn't so much I was living with that kind of fear because I didn't know what was going on. 'Cause I'm not from Japan, right? I just had the feeling I'm an American, so what, I don't have to go demolish any of what I have, but I guess they were afraid.

But they had reason to be afraid because there were a couple of older men, bachelors, single, that lived in Redlands and I think they had a little bit to do with the Japanese school in San Bernardino, well, on December 7th they were picked up by the FBI. The next day I asked my mom, "What happened to Nigo-san, Oka-san?" "Damatte," she said. "Don't talk about it." So that's why they were living in fear. And luckily my dad wasn't involved in the schools, and they had a big group in San Bernardino where we used to go -- and I went as a kid and that's where I met a lot of the kids from San Bernardino -- we'd go there to just kind of a big auditorium with a stage, and before the war they had big American flag, big Japanese flag, I don't know what they did because I didn't understand 'em, but at the end they would all stand up and yell, "Banzai, banzai, banzai," about two or three times. So those people were picked up overnight on December 7th.

MN: While you were growing up, you mentioned a Japanese school, did you, did you attend Japanese school?

RW: No. I did in camp. I went about two weeks and I just told my mom it's too hard, I can't learn. But it wasn't too hard; I didn't want to learn. My attitude then was, why do I want to learn Japanese? I'm not Japanese. I just had that feeling, why should I do that? Now today, of course, I'm, I wish I had gone and learned because most of the Niseis I know, friends, did go to Japanese school at one time when they were younger, so they'll look at something in Japanese and say, oh, that's something, this kanji, that. They'll ask me something and I says, I don't know, I can't read that. I can't even read or write my own name and I still can't.

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