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SY: And then you ended up going to an assembly center?

HK: Yes, the people in the San Francisco Bay Area went to the Tanforan is what it was called, assembly center, and that was in May of 1942 after Executive Order 9066. And we went to Tanforan... I remember we went to... we reported in Hayward just below, just south of San Leandro. We had to report there. There was a library park there and we all had to go there with our luggage and I can remember the buses being all lined up and baggage on the sidewalks, and there were soldiers around with rifles and I don't know why they had to have all these soldiers around but there were soldiers. So then eventually we got onto the bus, we went across the bay to the Tanforan racetrack. And we disembarked there and we were assigned to a horse stable like a lot of other people. And like other people too when you first move into this, quite, "horse stable" it was... you could still smell the horses so it was quite an experience. And our beds were just cots and then they made mattresses... so-called mattresses. We used canvas bags and you stuffed in hay to make a mattress, it was kind of makeshift mattress obviously. Not the most comfortable in the world but again, we just had to accommodate ourselves to survive again.

SY: So you have vivid memories of that?

HK: Yes, that made an impact. I said, this is going to be our home for the next number of months? This is not a very nice place to be. I do remember one thing very vividly though. I was ten years old during my very formative period of life, and I think I was really too young to know what was really going on but I was old enough to know that something is not right. I had some sense of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and we had no legal standing, there was no trial, no jury, nothing. Just simply because we were Japanese, we were placed in assembly centers and eventually the internment camps. But I sort of, as I reflect back on that experience when I was ten years old, I thought about that experience of going to Tanforan and seeing these soldiers with rifles walking around, marching around telling us where to go, what to do, and I think I began to internalize some things at that point in time where I thought to myself, "Why are they doing this to us?" I didn't do anything wrong, I wasn't found guilty of any kind of crime, and I began to think that they're doing this to us because we're Japanese. And during those formative years, to have that experience, I think it's very damaging psychologically for a young kid of ten years old to realize that this is happening to him and he hadn't done anything wrong. So you're still developing your self concept, your sense of ego, and I began to internalize the fact that they're doing this to us because we're Japanese, therefore it's bad to be Japanese. You know, that's very damaging, and I think I still feel the impact of that to some degree. And I've talked to other Nisei who were about my age, some of them related some similar experiences and the damage that does to us in terms of our psyches. I think we still struggle with that even today after sixty plus years.

SY: Do you remember the assembly center at Tanforan where you were in a stable the whole time you were living there?

HK: Yes, we were there for I think about five months. And while the, what they call euphemistically "relocation camps" were being built inland so about in I guess August or September, we boarded trains to go to Utah.

SY: And what was the... do you remember what you did while you were at the assembly center? Did they have school?

HK: We had school, which was ironic here this is my... two sisters above me, she was a college student so they recruited her to do some teaching. And she had never taught before so she tried to pitch in. And she was my teacher for a while. [Laughs] Then we had to just make do with whoever was available so we did have school, yes.

SY: So she taught and helped --

HK: Reading, writing and arithmetic like an elementary school class.

SY: And a class of twenty, thirty people do you remember?

HK: Probably about maybe twenty, maybe eighteen to twenty but here again, people just pitched in to help in whatever we could so I'm not sure it was super education but we went to school.

SY: And did you enjoy it all, the transition, in terms of having more free time?

HK: That's true too, you know, I was too young to work, to do much work on the farm but we had, quote, more "free times," therefore we had a lot of kids to play with, so we did that to pass the time of day.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.