<Begin Segment 11>

SY: Do you remember how long it was between the time that you got the note -- that Pearl Harbor happened and then you --

NS: Not too long, 'cause we had to get ready. We had to get rid of all the stuff, we had to clean the house and get ready to go to camp. So it wasn't too long. Right after it seems. 'Cause I remember Mama buying a lot of things, you know, to get ready to go to the camp because we didn't want to go with old clothes and stuff, so we had to go shopping. When you're in the country, you have old clothes, all the old clothes, the brothers all had torn pants and everything. They don't care, they wear like that in the country. They'd rather wear torn pants, and not too many had too nice clothes, so Mama took us shopping and Papa took us shopping to buy clothes.

SY: Because you knew you were gonna go away, so they actually bought things.

NS: Uh-huh.

SY: And what about the things that you had to sell?

NS: Well, nobody bought it. We had to leave it, that's why they were sad. They were so sad. My father bought all those new refrigerator, and we had nice refrigerator at that time. And not too many people, inaka didn't have electric ones, they all had those ice ones. Do you remember ice box? I guess so. I guess you won't remember that. Your mother would probably, ask your mother, if you have your mother, to tell you. Well, anyhow, it was the kind that had, you buy ice. They come to sell it. In other words, delivery people will bring it to you. You put this ice in there, in the box on one side and then that keeps the food cold. But then my father bought one small electric one just before the war, small one. Not big. Oh, we used to... oh my god, it was still new, and when we thought of leaving that, we were sad. So we stocked that up into the back stockroom, when we came it was gone. Everything was gone; nothing was there, everything.

SY: So you packed up things and then you left them in this back house?

NS: Uh-huh. Not a thing. There wasn't even a thing left in there. They took everything and it was gone.

SY: So you don't know how it got...

NS: So my father and mother was so mad, they said, "Oh, my gosh, new refrigerator and all this stuff was gone."

SY: So instead of selling things...

NS: We couldn't. We had no time. Nobody wanted to buy anything at that time, especially Japanese stuff.

SY: So you stacked it all in this back house.

NS: Uh-huh. Everybody, same thing. Not just us, all the Dominguez Hills people did the same thing. And when they came back, there was nothing.

SY: So did your father make an arrangement with the man who leased the land?

NS: No. He wasn't even around. He was dead already by the time we came back. He was an old man.

SY: So do you think he just assumed that you would have a house when you came back?

NS: Yes. No, right away we found out. So then my brother was old enough to come to West L.A. to buy a house, so that's where we bought the house.

SY: That was after the war.

NS: Yeah.

SY: So before the war did you have a car?

NS: Yes, oh, yes. We had two car. We had a truck for the farming, and then my father had, for the flower he had one of those, what do you call those? Covered one. They call it...

SY: Some sort of truck. So he had the flower...

NS: Yeah, yeah. Because the flower get ruined if you don't put it in there.

SY: And do you know what happened to those?

NS: They're gone. We had it all packed up in the back of the house, had the garage, too. Packed, locked up.

SY: So you left the cars?

NS: Everything. You can't take anything to the camp except your clothes. They tell you, they have a list of things you could only take.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.