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TI: But before we go to camp, I want to go back to the farm. You talked about how the farmers were essentially told, "Plant your crops as part of the war effort, be loyal Americans." And you're saying when farmers do that, they're putting everything into the ground to do that. And you're saying, but the exclusion orders and the time to leave, it was a time when the crops were still in the ground.

LI: Oh, yeah, they had just planted all their crops. And when they were evacuated, the guy who took over their farm actually harvested like the very next day. He started harvesting peas the very next day. And he said, "Oh, yeah, I'll share the crop with you," but he never did.

TI: So that's what happened to your family?

LI: Yeah, they lost everything they had.

TI: So who took it over? Who did your father, or not your father, but grandfather find to...

LI: Well, the guy who took it over was the produce broker that my grandfather was selling to, and his name was Ken Lynch. So my aunt (Tamaki) was really ticked off at this guy. My grandma's term -- and it probably helped them to persevere -- the term that she used was "shikata ga nai." And so I guess it means, I asked her, "What does that mean?" and she goes, "It cannot be helped." Kind of like, you know, you just got to live with it and go on. And so I don't know how many times they probably had to use that terminology to their children, but tough, very tough.

TI: What about all the equipment, the possessions, the mobile bunkhouse if that was still around, what happened to all of that stuff?

LI: Well, I think they tried to dispose of whatever they can. But if you only have seven days, you're not going to get much. And so I'm guessing that whatever didn't get sold was just left with the property.

TI: And at this point, for the Inaba family, now well into the second generation, the family didn't own any land.

LI: No. Because by the time my uncle's, my oldest uncle was old enough to sign, that was when they were being evacuated. Just prior to evacuation, my dad's cousin Joe, who was Tomoji  Inaba's son, was old enough. And he signed for some of their land, and so that when my grandma said, "Oh, that was JT Inaba, ranch number two." And so some of the older Niseis were old enough to sign the leases, and if they had enough money, they could buy, but not the Shukichi Inaba family.

TI: So when we think about 1941, '42, roughly how many Japanese and Japanese Americans were in the valley?

LI: I think a thousand were evacuated from the valley, a little bit over a thousand. And so really it's a pretty big number. Because when I see pictures of my dad's grade schools, some of those classes had about a quarter Japanese in them. So that's a pretty good population of Japanese in the community.

TI: Okay. So we're not going to spend a whole bunch of time other than I've done interviews of Niseis who were from the Wapato/Yakima area, and so we already kind of had the stories of going from here to the Portland Assembly Center.

LI: Right, right.

TI: But before I go there, there's something, when I think about the interviews I did years ago about that, I've come to discover there was actually -- I'm just curious if you know anything about this -- there were plans and actually some construction of an assembly center that was supposed to be in Toppenish. Have you ever heard about that?

LI: No.

TI: Yeah, there was an assembly center that was actually built, but it was built so poorly or there were other problems that they never opened it. There was a planned assembly center in Toppenish.

LI: Huh, I did not know that.

TI: Yeah. And so our historian, Brian Niiya, came across that, and I thought that was really interesting. Because the people from Wapato, the Yakima area, they were transported all the way to Portland in Oregon, kind of the west side, and then from there, they would then generally go to Heart Mountain.

LI: Right.

TI: And so it was kind of a long trek. And it was kind of interesting that it seems like it kept the Wapato people together. Because a lot of people that were at the Portland Assembly Center went to Minidoka, but the Wapato community went to Heart Mountain.

LI: Yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.