<Begin Segment 21>

MN: I want to get into the war years, okay?

RN: What?

MN: I want to get into the war.

RN: Into the war?

MN: The war years. What were you doing on December 7, 1941?

RN: We were laying on the lawn at Boyle Heights when the war broke out. We heard it on the radio.

MN: What was your reaction when you heard the news?

RN: No reaction. At that time my mother had just come down from Seattle and we were living, we were renting a house in Boyle Heights. My mother was there and my two married sisters. Those days nobody moved too far away. We all lived close together, so then we got together and said okay, we'll stick together. So we all went together and my two married sisters, my brother, my mother, my sisters, we all stuck together and we went to Poston together.

MN: So after, the day after Pearl Harbor what happened to your job at the wholesale market?

RN: There was no job. That wholesale market was closed tight. Every door was locked. Only one open was an orange distributor, a hakujin fruit distributor, but every other house was locked solid.

MN: Did you know anyone who got picked up by the FBI? [RN shakes head] When did you hear that you have to go to camp?

RN: I don't know where I heard it from, but it, word just gets around. And I don't know how the Japanese communicated those days, but even after, when the war started we stayed home, but then, what the hell, I says, I went by myself, took the P-car downtown to First Street here and walked around. There was no trouble. And I attended some of the meetings, those older Nisei, they had meetings down there and I attended some of those meetings. It was open to anybody.

MN: What were they talking about at the meetings?

RN: I don't know, nothing special. About where you're gonna go or where you're gonna stay or, there was talk about who wants to volunteer, I think one of them was to volunteer with the American officials, what's gonna happen. But it was nothing special.

MN: What did Little Tokyo look like when you took the P-car?

RN: Oh, it was empty. It was nothing. The kurombos hadn't moved in. It was just plain empty. All the stores were closed. Only thing comin' through was the streetcar. Really. Yeah, I didn't go downtown; I just walked around First Street. When I got tired I'd take the P-car, the red car, the streetcar or P-car up back to Boyle Heights, but there was no trouble.

MN: You mentioned a lot of the Boyle Heights people were moving so that they could go into Manzanar?

RN: Yeah, there was a lot of Japanese living up at that time and I don't know how they communicated, but a lot of them were moving, were moving downtown here. I don't know where they were gonna move to downtown here, 'cause they heard that they were going to Manzanar and, well, it was Santa Anita first. It wasn't Manzanar, it was Santa Anita. They said a lot of Japanese were being, living in Santa Anita temporarily, so then they moved there because, I don't know, for some reason they wanted to make sure that they would go where the other Japanese were going, see? But we stayed put in our house because we were gonna stick together, but we didn't know where we were gonna end up at.

MN: So your family didn't have to report to a gathering place?

RN: What?

MN: Your family didn't have to go to gathering place?

RN: We stayed in our same house. We never, we were never assembled nowhere. We just stayed there. There was my family and a few of my Seattle friends were staying, came to stay with us. When the war broke out they didn't go back to Seattle. They came and they stayed with us. There was a couple of my brother's friends and a couple of my friends, and they were bachelors, and I don't know why they didn't go back to Seattle to stay with their family. They said, "Now we're gonna stay with you guys."

MN: So what happened while you were staying in the house? How long did you stay in your Boyle Heights house?

RN: I would say about three months. Yeah. Maybe... December, that was December. December, January, February, March, April, we hit camp sometime in April, I remember. The hot weather hadn't started yet, see, and it was, December 7th was, December, January, February, March. We stayed there 'til March, I think.

MN: You had no job now. How were you able to survive?

RN: Well, the rent was cheap in those days and we were going broke. My brother had, was working at the fruit stand at that time, I was working at the wholesale, I had no bank account. My daughter, my sister, younger sister, she was, she was attending Woodberry High School at that time. And all we lived on was our savings, and we were getting concerned, said jeez, when they comin' to take us? Hell, we got no place to go, we got no income. Rent was, in those days was cheap, was, we were paying, what, I think it was twenty-eight or thirty dollars a month. And we had to pay our own utilities. My other two married sisters, they were living in their same house.

MN: Did you run out of food?

RN: Huh?

MN: Did you run out of food?

RN: No, no. We had money for groceries.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.