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BN: And then we'll go to December 7th now, and what do you remember about that?

AM: What I remember is, like everybody did, I guess, that it was a Sunday, and I came home from church and my family was talking about the war, about Pearl Harbor being bombed. I didn't know what it all meant, but I knew that it was something serious and everybody was worried about it. And it was a worrisome time because some of the things that I noticed was we always had a picture of Abraham Lincoln in our living room, I don't know why, but we always did. But a lot of people started having Washington or Lincoln, big portraits in their house. My siblings, Nails and Fumi, were not able to go to UCLA because it was further away than the restrictions. And, in fact, my mother, her best friend's youngest son had a medical emergency and had to go to the hospital. And the only hospital in Los Angeles that took Japanese, other than the Japanese hospital, was the one in Boyle Heights. It's Seventh Day Adventist, and they took him, but again, that was past our limits for where we could drive, but my mother drove it anyway, and she's a very law-abiding person, but it was really important for her to be with her best friend when she was having such a hard time. So those kinds of things were scary, knowing we were, she was doing things that were against the law. Maybe even with my siblings, they might have gone out at night past the curfew, and might have talked about hiding, because somehow I remember hearing about cars and people hiding in their cars. What other things? Oh, one of the things was my uncle was taken by the FBI fairly soon after December 7th, and a lot of my father's friends were taken, and since he was active in the community, he thought he was going to go, too. And so he bought a leather bag, and my brother stenciled G. Iwasaki on it, and he had his things all packed and by the door of our house in case the FBI came, he was going to be ready. And he always went to work like at two in the morning, because he went to the wholesale warehouse, so he was gone when I was waking up. And during that time, when I would wake up, the first thing I'd do was to go and check to see whether the bag was there. So the bag was really, it became very special to me. At one point, my niece wanted to have it, and I said, "No, I'm sorry, you can't have that one, we'll keep it." And you may have heard on the 50 Objects thing that that was one of the things.

And this is kind of going off, but I just wanted to say that a couple weeks ago I was at a Day of Remembrance program at a community college, and Tom Izu, who plans that program for seventeen years now, showed the 50 Objects thing that had my bag. And the part of the program at the end were three Muslim young women who went to that college, and Tom asked, "What about the experience of Japanese Americans touches you or is anything like what you've experienced?" And one of the girls said, "Oh, it was the bag, because every time my father goes to the mosque, I worry whether he's going to come back." And so she was, you know, experiencing what I did, currently.

BN: Unfortunately. Did he, I assume he never, they never came for him?

AM: No, they never did.

BN: He was able to go with the family?

AM: Yeah, we always wondered about that. But my cousin said she remembers people asking her mother, "Has Gen-san gone yet? Have they come after him yet?" Luckily he didn't, and since my uncle had gone and my aunt, and his mother had four children, six years old and under, and the youngest was a baby in arms, my father was able to arrange for them to live in the room right next to us when we went to Pomona.

BN: Did the family have any inkling as to why that particular uncle was picked up?

AM: No. Oh, yeah, I do remember. I think there was some kind of a celebration in Japan, a national celebration for so many years of some kind of event. And they used that as a chance to go, because a lot of people were going to visit the family. They weren't involved in the imperial, whatever it was that they were having it all, but that made the FBI think that he might be...

BN: Yeah, many people who went to that were arrested. It was the 2,600th anniversary of the supposed Japanese empire, 1940, many Nikkei attended.

AM: So that was it?

BN: Yeah, that would do it. Do you remember much about that in between period in terms of having to pack up and prepare for getting taken away?

AM: I don't remember the packing up. I remember events like my mother and her friends doing the haramaki, where they embroidered a thousand little buds to protect the soldiers. Which was kind of interesting because very soon afterwards, Japanese Americans weren't allowed to serve 'til later.

BN: And then you mentioned that the house, that because they owned it, they were able to rent it to a neighbor. Do you know what happened with the business?

AM: Oh, they sold it, they had to sell it to the Thrifty Mart people. And I think it was very fortunate because a lot of people didn't have access to cash after, because banks were closing down and such. But because they had to sell the business, they were able to have enough cash so that when my siblings wanted to go to college, they were able to send them to college. And I read a letter from one of my uncles, I think his brother-in-law wrote a letter back in those days, I think it was to his uncle who was at Tuna Canyon, explaining how much money they got and what they were able to do. And that's what made me realize we were fairly fortunate then, because we had access to things, resources that a lot of people could not at that point... you know, like if  you were a salaried person and you had your money in the Tokyo Bank or something, you're not going to be able to get it.

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