Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Miyatake Interview I
Narrator: Henry Miyatake
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 26, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-mhenry-01-0022

<Begin Segment 22>

TI: So you found out that you were being evacuated to Puyallup. Why don't you talk about what happened at this point.

HM: First concern for my dad was, "What are we going to do with the grocery store with all the inventory?" We had all the canned goods and stuff like that. Because there were, what, a hundred grocery stores in Seattle, more than a hundred I guess, that Japanese Americans were running. Mom and Pop stores most of them. The market for grocery stores went down the tube. And so, the previous year my dad has spent about nine thousand dollars to revamp the store. We had new showcases, refrigerated showcases, new freezer cabinets, new cabinetry, new everything, and this was done in 1940, I guess. Since the market had dropped to zilch, we were trying to get any kind of buyer to buy into the place. There was a Filipino guy that was married to a Japanese woman and he wanted to buy the place. He wanted to buy the place, lock, stock and barrel with equipment and all the inventory for four hundred bucks. Four hundred bucks! [Laughs] Anyway, this really perturbed my dad. But when it came down to the bottom line, he says well, "Four hundred bucks is better than nothing. Besides, what are we going to do having all these canned goods rot on the shelves. And the equipment goes to pot, so let's take the four hundred." And that's what my dad sold the grocery store for, four hundred bucks.

My brother was kinda perturbed at this fact that we're allowed only the things we can carry, because that's what the Wartime Civil Control Administration, WCCA, had specified in the process of evacuation. But, you were allowed to bring your own vehicle at the risk of not being able to guarantee what's going to happen to the vehicle. My brother had worked on this Model A and he had reworked the engine and all that kind of stuff, you know, what they were doing, putting bigger tires on, you know what kids were doing in that era. He figured well, "I'm going to take this car in, I'm gonna bring whatever you think is necessary, cooking utensils and whatever we think is needed for survival." So bedding and some of his test equipment, his prized plywood cabinet, one with all the equipment and already assembled in there and his nice case that we painted black and all this kind of stuff. We had it all partitioned with cushioning material and all this kind of stuff. He put all of his test gear, radio gear and all this kind of stuff in there that the Feds didn't take off with. Then we had all of the household stuff that we think we could use, like clothing and things of this nature and we packed it in his car. And he drove it to Puyallup. They had a caravan of these guys and they all drove it to Puyallup. Of course we didn't know that the Feds were going to auction it off.

TI: They auctioned off the cars?

HM: Yeah, while we were in Puyallup right at the end there. He drove with this amount of stuff, supplies, into Puyallup and we went on the bus. We went from Collins Playfield, in fact, right up the road here, right North end, where the field house used to be. We were assembled there and they put us into the busses and off we went to Puyallup. I had been to Puyallup Fairgrounds before because the school used to bring us down there once every other year or so, and so I was familiar with the place. The dipper was still there. I was kind of familiar with the whole assembly center. They put us into the middle of the, where they used to have the racetrack, where they have the open area presently. They used to have a 6 furlong racetrack around the periphery, right around there. And they had built barracks inside of that racetrack area and we happened to have the longest barrack in all of Puyallup. We had seventeen partitioned units in that barrack and we were in the third one from the middle, that's where they put us. It was sixteen by twenty, ship lap construction, place.

TI: Going back to your brother and his car, so he was able to take everything out of the car and bring it into Puyallup but then the Feds took the car and they auctioned off not only his car, but all the cars that went down in that caravan?

HM: Yeah but the auctioning didn't take place for about two months. They confiscated the cars after we brought the stuff in. They were allowed to drive the cars into Puyallup and they would not allow the cars to be driven to the areas where our units were located but you had to hand transport those things. But they put into a holding area -- where they used to have the horses and mules and animals -- and they put the cars into that area and we had to physically bring all the items using our own physical capabilities to our housing units. So we had more stuff than everybody else did, most everybody else did. There was other families that did the same thing but they were risking the vehicles and two months later we weren't allowed to bid on those vehicles the Feds confiscated the vehicles and they sold them to the open market.

TI: What was the thinking in terms of confiscating the vehicles? Why did the Feds...?

HM: They had a perfect right to, according to them, because we took the vehicles in at our own risk and they had stated that they were not responsible for what happens after we go into the camp. But we weren't allowed to keep the vehicles, they were put into an impound area where we had no access to once we took the materials out of the vehicle. Unfortunate part of it was that my brother had spent his farm work money and all this kind of stuff building up that vehicle and I think he got ten bucks for that vehicle. That broke his heart, it was pathetic, he was really sad. First time I seen him cry. But that's the way things were at that time.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.