<Begin Segment 6>

EO: It's December and this is going to be, actually, the last Christmas that you're going to spend with your family for a while. You don't know that then, right? But, so, tell me, what is your wife's name?

HU: Yaso. Y-A-S-O.

EO: And what was Christmas like for you that year?

HU: December?

EO: In 1941.

HU: Well, we didn't have hardly anything to celebrate at that Christmas, those days. Very sort of kind of we don't want to be... celebrate anything those days because so many people been interned and you hear so many sad things here and there. Like Imperial Valley, there's some people been attacked by Filipinos because the news out there is very bad. After the Christmas, I think more likely, those news came out...you know, Japan invaded the Philippines and killed the children and raped the women, these and that. Well, government, you know, during the wartime, always propaganda is very... and special I learned just a few years ago, some of the college professors, they had oral history meeting in San Francisco, I think, in 1989, one professor wrote about communism. I didn't know anything about how the communist people from Japan, about thirty of them, they never went in the camps. They been hired by the CIA to use as a propaganda that material they're going to write. They've been taken over to the place there or they stayed there, about thirty, thirty or thirty-two people. They were writing all kinds of propaganda material so they could be... in case a plane gonna fly over Japan, they're going to spread all those things by the plane. So they was working for... so all kind of propaganda was going on, you know, and more like a hatred toward the Japanese.

EO: Now, by this time, tell me, you have some children.

HU: Yeah.

EO: Tell me about them.

HU: Well, I had three children. Two of them going to the Maryknoll, you know, downtown, near the Japantown. They're going by the bus. Maryknoll had their own bus. And we paid so much a month for... those days it was very cheap. They feed lunch and teach the American school until 3 o'clock. And after that, a couple of hours, they teach the Japanese and they bring back the kids about 6 o'clock in the afternoon -- evening. So we sent in two, two of my older boys to there. And the younger one still stayed home. And...

EO: Now, right after this bombing, when did the curfew happen?

HU: Curfew happen... my gosh, I don't remember the date but curfew happened I think after sometime around February, I think. Early February, I think. I'm not too sure of the exact date.

EO: Did your assets get frozen?

HU: Pardon me?

EO: Your assets in the bank, were they frozen?

HU: Yeah. You know, my wife took 'em about Japanese bank, Sumitomo was in downtown Japantown, and they paid me 6 percent interest if you put in a time deposit for a year. So we had about thousand yen deposited in one year term and that thing was frozen. And I had a couple of hundred dollars worth of American bond, war bond, but as soon as they throw us in the camp, I sold that. I took a loss. [Laughs]

EO: Did you ever get your money back out of Sumitomo?

HU: No, nothing. That cost me $250. That was today's money, maybe more than $10,000. To me those days, very hard to save the money in the '30s. Very difficult.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.