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YW: So we went to Tanforan, and like I said, we saw these barracks, and I thought, well, okay, I will go into one of those barracks. But they said you were assigned to this apartment number and you go find your apartment, that's where you'll be living. But my apartment turned out to be a horse stable. And I know now that they had beautiful stables, but in those days, the horses were stabled in these horse stalls, one horse, one stable. And the stable was just wide enough to put in two cots, one was for my husband, one was for myself, and then in the front end, my father. My family consisted of myself, my husband and my father. And I told my father at that time, "I'm not going to go in there, I'm not a horse." And he said, "Your government's asking you to do this." And like I said, they said, "To prove your loyalty, you do as we ask you to do now." So that was the biggest shock. It was a bigger shock than going to Topaz.

PW: Where did your sister go?

YW: She was in the same camp, but she had, her husband (and he) had his own family that he had to take care of, so they were another family.

PW: And was your husband a Nisei?

YW: He was a Nisei.

PW: Was your father ever visited by the police or by the FBI?

YW: No, not that I know of. And I was a little bit surprised because I had heard that so many Isseis were arrested, taken, but we never had any occasion where my dad had any problems. So when he left, there was a Chinese family that lived across the street from his laundry, and my dad asked him if he would take over the laundry, just run it, just keep the doors open. Just keep all the money that came in and just run the business, just keep it open until he was able to come back. And they did this, I don't know how they did it, because this Chinese man didn't speak Japanese, my father didn't speak Chinese, they didn't speak very good English together. But somehow, because of years of just being neighbors, being friendly, they settled that business on a handshake, just talking the way they talked, and they understood each other. And this Chinese man kept the laundry going until Dad was able to come back after the war, which was about four years, it was about five years before I was able to come back, and Dad was able to come back a little before I did. So it was close to five years, I guess, that this Chinese man did run the business for him. So we had a place to come back to. So I consider myself lucky.

PW: Do you remember going to the Civil Control Station, or did your husband go register the family?

YW: No, we didn't have to go through all that. It seemed like they had all our information that they needed. And so I didn't understand why we still had to, we still had to go to a camp. I couldn't understand that, because my husband and I, we had all the papers we thought we needed, and we had never been a problem with the law, we'd never been arrested for anything, and we had our birth certificates, what else did we need? They said we had everything. So that's why I thought that after everything got cleared, we would come back and nothing would have changed. But I didn't realize that when I came back, there was nothing. I knocked on the door, and there were some people living in my shop. And I said, "What happened to all the equipment in my beauty shop?" And they said when they moved in, that place was empty.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.