<Begin Segment 14>

TI: What happened to the farm, like all the chickens? I mean, you had thousands of chickens.

MK: Thousands of chickens, and the Chinese people would come and they would, and we had to sell the chickens for twenty-five cents. When we buy the chickens we buy them for twenty-five cents.

TI: But they're chicks.

MK: They'd be baby chicks. And we raised those to be hens, and my mother said, "Well, what are we gonna do?" So then I, we can't take 'em, so they'd just come in those little, like a three-quarter ton truck with the little cages, and they would just... so the last few days before we left, there were just trucks and trucks coming to buy chickens. But my mother had just bought like a thousand chicks from the hatchery, which was a Japanese hatchery, so when we, so when we were evacuated and we all went and then they came, they were in Winnipeg too. And we worked and they all worked, and my mother paid for those chicks. And the guy at the hatchery, the guy said, "Your mother's the only one that paid for their chicks." My mother says, well, she bought 'em and she has to. And even at that, they sex the chickens and if so many are, you don't get to...

TI: 'Cause they're male.

MK: That's right. But, so I know the man, when I was leaving to go to Ontario I went to say goodbye to, because they're all from our area, I went to say goodbye and that's when he told me. He said, "Your mom and I told her she didn't have to, but, you know." So I said, "Well, I guess my mother doesn't..." and so we all worked in the city and put all our money into the same family, family bank so that she wasn't going to...

TI: But how about things like your other assets? So your bank accounts and things like that, did you still have access to all that money?

MK: No, it's all closed, everything. You know, and all the Japanese are putting it in Japan banks.

TI: Right.

MK: Yeah, they just shut those down.

TI: So those are all frozen.

MK: That's right. And they're, so I mean, it's, it was a tumultuous time because we didn't know whether we were, what, really what to, what to do or what to expect.

TI: So the farm, what did you to kind of prepare the farm for your leaving? Did you find someone to take care of it?

MK: Well, next door, we rented an acreage next door and they were friends, and so we had a barn there, so we took, because we knew them, we took, like, Japanese dishes and all that. Well, people went and ransacked and stole everything, so we didn't, we didn't have nothing.

TI: So during this time when, after Pearl Harbor, was there any, like, anti-Japanese feelings? Like did you observe discrimination?

MK: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

TI: Tell me about that. What was that like?

MK: Well, you know, but the thing about it was that my, the direct neighbor, when we had a reunion and we all went, all of us went back to Strawberry Hill and Kennedy and we had a reunion there, and my sister Yuki, the oldest one, she -- the hakujin people had a separate party and they invited us to one of the people's home, and my sister Yuki wouldn't go. Because she said they didn't even come, well, nobody came to say goodbye to us either. But so, but we went. Find out, they say one day they got up and they said, "Well, where's the Entas?" We were gone. So they were, they were not to be blamed because they didn't know, but Yuki never forgave, never forgave them, so she wouldn't go there.

TI: Because your oldest, older sister thought that they should've been there to say goodbye.

MK: That's right.

TI: They should've been more helpful.

MK: Right. But then, like, so when they explained it us, then we said, well yeah. But maybe we should've ran over and said we're not, we're gonna be gone or something, but we were tied up in everything that we needed to do to get going. They were changing the time and, because they were taking us to a train, and so they were saying, "We're gonna pick you up at six o'clock in the morning," or whatever, and before you know it the truck is, the truck is at our house. And so it was, there was no time to go around. And so only the people that were, that owned the lot next, the acreage, they were at the station. They found out we were leaving and so they came to the station to see us off.

TI: That's interesting. Now, was, how about cases of, like more discrimination in terms of maybe name calling?

MK: No.

TI: Or vandalism or anything like that?

MK: No, no. We grew up with these people, and they were, a lot of Germans and like the Italian people, they couldn't figure it out too. Especially Italian people, they just could not figure out why, why the big fuss. They weren't being taken.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.