<Begin Segment 4>

CO: Okay, so what, what were you doing and how old were you when the war broke out? And do you remember that day?

HY: Oh, yeah. I heard it on the radio early in the morning and I went to tell my father and his friend, our neighbor, Matsumoto-san. And they didn't believe me, you know, what does a girl know, you know. This is just something I'm just, I must have misheard or something. And later on they became aware that it really did happen, you know. And my father came and said, "Japan and the U.S. are at war." And I said, "I already told you." [Laughs] So that's how much my word was taken in those days. And I was already, what, nineteen -- no, I was already twenty, I think. Yeah, I think so. 'Cause that happened in December and we were evacuated in May. Yeah, I was already twenty. And that's how much they took my word for things. [Laughs]

CO: Had you ever been to Japan?

HY: No. My aunt went two or three times, I remember, but my father never went back and my mother never went back.

CO: Did they ever talk about returning to Japan?

HY: Well, I guess when people like from their village, they all intended to make a pile and go back, you know. But very few did because once your children start going to school and becoming American, how can you do that, you know? The children probably wouldn't want to go. There were a few that did. But one I remember was a childless couple that went. And there were a few that sent their kids back for a little education. They would come back speaking mainly Japanese and those were the Kibei. And so it took them a while to adjust.

CO: You were not a dual citizen?

HY: Yeah, when I was born, the plan was that I'd go back to Japan with my grandfather, so what they told me was that my birth was registered at the Japanese consulate and there was no need for me to, you know, be registered here as being born or anything. So that kind of haunted me. And I don't know whether it was before or after my grandfather left without me that I would have this nightmare where I'd be in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and I wouldn't know whether to go to Japan or come back to California. You know, I felt like I was... and the water would be rising higher and higher. [Laughs] And, but I don't know if that was because I missed my grandfather or if I was afraid of going back with him. I can't place it in time. And finally when war was declared, I thought I'd better find out for sure what my status was. So I wrote to the county recorder and the midwife had registered my birth. So there I was, an American citizen after all.

CO: Do you have, have siblings?

HY: What?

CO: Siblings.

HY: Oh, yeah. Well, I have two brothers living now. The brother just under me joined, volunteered for the 442nd and he was killed in Italy in 1944.

CO: That's jumping ahead. Let's go back to evacuation. We should establish just the fact that she had brothers early on. So we can get to your brothers --

HY: I think I already mentioned them, right? Yeah, that I was the oldest. I had four brothers. One died in infancy, and the youngest...

CO: I know that your mother died...

[Interruption]

HY: My mother died on September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler marched into Poland. That's the way I, I remember it. So that was two tragic events.

CO: So that changed your family situation.

HY: Oh, yeah... my father couldn't, it was a family farm, so he couldn't very well carry on by himself, so that's when he went down to Oceanside and he worked for the Matsumotos and then the Matsumotos helped us build a house and gave him some land so he could start growing strawberries again.

CO: Okay, what do you recall about the atmosphere after Pearl Harbor?

HY: Well, there was a lot of consternation. And we dug a hole and we were burying things that might connect us to Japan like Japanese magazines. And I remember my youngest brother, Yuk, burying his kendo uniform and stick, you know, in that big hole that was dug. And might as well not have bothered because -- [laughs] -- we had to go to Arizona anyway.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.