Densho Digital Archive - Hiroshi Kashiwagi Interview (denshovh-khiroshi-01-0002)

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CO: -- when the war started, your family was in farming.

HK: Yeah. Well, my parents were in the, running this store. And before the war, I guess, in 1939 or '40, when I went to L.A., he stopped the store and moved to a farm and they were sharecropping. And by the time I was through high school and I came back, and I helped there, and then my father decided, well, he better go and get treatment. So he went to the sani-, sanitarium. And so he was there when the war started.

CO: In the sanitarium.

HK: Yeah. And we were all of us, sort of running the ranch, my mother and my brother and myself. And my brother was still going to high school. So we had to make our own decisions. It was pretty far up the mountain, about... how many miles was it? About 15 or 20 miles. And so yeah, we had to make our own decisions. Some, some friends came by and gave us advice, and sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn't. We had to, we, a friend came and said maybe we should move voluntarily before the order and so we went out and bought a car because we only had this old panel that was cut down into a pickup for a ranch truck. [Laughs] And so we bought this old car, thinking maybe we'll use it to move out. And it was really a bad car, and we didn't know anything about cars... you know, it made a lot of smoke. And then the order came, and so we had to leave the car. And so we brought it back to the dealer. And he was pretty honest. We thought we lost money. But he was one man who came to the assembly center with a check. We left it so that he could sell it. And he sold it and he brought the check and he was one of our first visitors at the assembly center, which was very nice. Another man that I befriended during that time before evacuation was the postmaster. And he was also the notary public. And I think I had to do something with my, my birth certificate, and he notarized it and all that. So I got to know him, and he came to visit us at the camp.

EO: Which assembly center?

HK: Marysville, Arboga. It was an old pasture. Lots of gnats and mosquitoes, terrible.

CO: Tents or buildings?

HK: No, it was a building. Temporary, very temporary building. And kind of fancy outhouses. It was really awful. I think in many ways, that was the worst part of camp experience: the assembly center experience, because everything was so temporary. And we had to line up all the time for food and line up, and line up for the latrine -- [laughs] -- and it's terrible. But... let's see. So there was my mother, my sister, and my brother, and myself. So we went to Arboga and from Arboga we went on to Tule Lake. And we didn't see my father all during the time that we were in camp, which was almost four years.

CO: He was in the sanitarium?

HK: Yeah. And maybe I should say this now, but I really feel that the tragedy of the whole thing was that, you know, we were in Tule Lake, and here my father was in the sanitarium, at the mercy of the white nurses and doctors who were, probably were very racist, and knowing that the family's in Tule Lake, and very bad reputation, I don't know what kind of treatment he got. You know, he never told us, but it must have been awful, real bad. And he tried to convince us that we should sign and leave, but then when we were so determined not to, he said, "No, I won't say anymore." And we never knew what happened to him.