<Begin Segment 16>

EO: Now, way back we forgot to ask you, what were you doing and how did you feel when you heard about Pearl Harbor?

CO: Oh, didn't we ask? Did we ask that?

HK: Well, yeah, I remember, I wrote a poem about, I was chopping wood left-handed. I don't know, I'm sort of ambidextrous, and I remember I chopped wood. We used to have to chop wood for winter, it was December, so, and that was one of my chores. And I was chopping wood and that's when we heard the news, yeah. It was kind of frightening, because my father was away and to get that news. Another story that I like to tell is that we had a flock of chickens. And we, we raised them from day-old chicks. And they're red, I don't know what kind. I'm sure...

CO: Rhode Island Reds.

HK: Rhode Island Reds. And we'd eat the roosters and we had, still had quite a few, about fifteen or twenty. And when camp, when the order came to leave, we didn't want to leave the chickens to the boss. And so I had to kill them all, one after another. Boom, boom, boom. [Makes chopping motion with arm] And then we had to dress them. My mother made tsukudani with it, and we put it in jars, in the duffel bag, and that's what we ate during the assembly center, when the food was so bad. We ate those, and they were so good. [Laughs] But they were nice red chickens so that, that we had raised. Golly, to kill those things, I got so expert that I could do it without much struggling. [Laughs] But, and then we took salami to camp. Do you remember taking salami? Dry salami. And those are so good. Yeah. And we'd slice it and I'd have some every night.

EO: Did you have to dispose of your other things?

HK: Well, we stored our things there where we were, in the barn or somewhere. And we had a Coleman stove and when we came back, it had been used. People had been in the cabin, and I guess the boss brought it out and let them use it. And it wouldn't work when we got it. And then we had this, as I said, this pickup. And we sold it to the boss for fifty dollars or forty dollars or something. But that's how we got to the town, about three miles away from where we boarded the bus. And then we drove ourselves to town. And then we, I drove the pickup to a garage in town. The garage from where once, as a new car, we bought the pickup. And the boss, of course, knew that garage so that later in the day, after we had left, he would go there and pick up, get the pickup and drive it back. But that's how we got, got ourselves to the town where we left for camp, yeah.

EO: Did you destroy any of your things?

HK: We had big butcher knives that we buried. These were fish knives, really long knives, that my father had for filleting fish, and we buried those. And we had a nice snow cone machine. It had things... and every time I see a snow cone, I remember. But we sold that for five dollars, yeah. And it happened that my mother was doing the wash, and she had a ring, her wedding ring, and she had taken it off, and left it there. When these people came to buy that thing, I guess they saw the ring and picked it up, too. So she lost a ring.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.