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MN: So now I want to get into the war years.

YK: Okay.

MN: What were you doing on Sunday, December 7, 1941?

YK: Well, I don't recall what I was doing, but I recall it came on the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. So my parents were very concerned, they said, "Well, in America, everybody has discriminated against the Japanese and now with the war, what's gonna happen to us?" And of course my older brothers and sisters were also very worried. I was only ten at the time, so I could see that everybody was very worried.

MN: And the next day was Monday. Did you go to school?

YK: Yes, I went to school as usual. I remember one incident there where some kids were pretending to be shooting into the air, and shooting down, like they were shooting down a zero airplane, and they said, "We got you, Yukio." So that kind of hurt quite a bit.

MN: Now, what did your family do with all the Japanese books and the records?

YK: Well, yeah. As soon as the war broke out, then the FBI arrested everybody who had any authority. They were the ministers, the newspaper people, anybody who imported goods from Japan and had any connection to Japan, they were immediately arrested. And so in their cases, of course, the mothers and the children were really in a quandary. Then they said that, you know, word got around that you better get rid of anything that's Japanese or they may take your father away. So my mother, I recall her burning everything related to Japan, because these were her only ties to her childhood. So, yeah, pictures... well, I guess it was mainly pictures. Any magazines, I guess she subscribed to some Japanese magazines, so all that was burned. And then shortly after the FBI did come, there were three men dressed in suits and hats, and so they searched everything on the farm. And also we were required as soon as the war broke out to turn in all knives over three inches, and of course all radios that might be able to call (shortwave), anyway, send messages or receive messages from afar, rather than the standard radio. Any guns, of course, we had shotguns and other guns. And then when (...) they wanted to know, be shown the receipts of everything that was turned in to the police. And my brother couldn't find the one, and so they were really pressuring him. And so I was the little kid who said, "Oh, it was a 12-gauge shotgun." [Laughs] And then, of course, the family glared at me, so I shut up right away. And fortunately, my brother was able to find the last receipt. 'Cause they were looking for any excuse to arrest the eldest son or father. And then they also turned to my brothers and said, "There's a war going on. We need people for the army, so one of you should volunteer," and he was looking at my oldest brother. But my second oldest brother, he said the oldest brother was needed for the family, so he'll volunteer. So they said, "Fine," and they took his name down, so he was drafted about a month or two later.

MN: When all this happened and you're looking at this from a child's eye, how did you feel?

YK: Well, of course, I felt very intimidated, and I could see how my parents and my older brother and sisters were all quite worried. So I knew it was very serious business that we didn't know what's gonna happen to us. We did know, we had some relatives who were in San Pedro, and they were kicked out of San Pedro, so they came to live with us on the farm for a couple months, after which then they were shipped out to Manzanar. And then we heard that in Manzanar, some people did drive their cars there, so we were getting our car ready and truck with the trailer hitched to carry our goods if we had to go to a camp. But then we were told that we can only take what we could carry. So we had to then (stop preparing). We didn't know how soon we'd be called, so we had to then start trying to sell everything. And of course as time got shorter, we were way out in the country, so there were about five cars per hour passing by on the street. There were only about five other families on the whole top of the mesa, so we kind of had to give it away. And trying to sell the farm, we only had one taker, a guy named Henry, and he was a Hispanic guy, very pleasant guy. Of course, he could afford to, he was getting our house and everything, barn, the whole farm, for ten cents on the dollar. And my sister told me later that he was supposed to, after the crops were picked, send us some of the money, but of course we never received that. And then we had put some big farm equipment, the tractor and some of the tools and other things in our neighbor's barn, but then we were notified later the government took 'em for the war effort, so we kind of lost everything.

MN: I'm gonna backtrack a little bit, and you talked about that incident where you saw, your mother took out the Japanese flag and you ran around the farm with it. And then when you had to burn everything that was connected to Japan, did you burn that Japanese flag also?

YK: Oh, yes, of course.

MN: How did you feel about seeing that flag burn?

YK: Well, I knew everything had to be burned, because we didn't want our father to be taken away. We already heard that other people were taken away, and we had been informed by friends, "You better just get rid of everything." So I knew that it all had to go.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.