Densho Digital Archive - Frank Emi Interview (denshovh-efrank-01-0002)

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EO: So, tell me about your, your situation, your family, your personal, at that time. What assembly center did you go to?

FE: At that time I had just gotten married. Let's see... that was, that was 1941, wasn't it? So I got married in 1940, so I was married a little over, a little, about a year. And on December 29th of 1941, my first child was born, that was Kathleen. And after the war had started, and -- shall we jump to where we were, got the notice of evacuation? We were living a few miles away from my parents at that time, so we heard that certain areas were going to different camps, so we decided to move in with our parents for the few weeks that was left before the evacuation. So we moved in with them and we were evacuated from there to the Pomona Assembly Center. In the usual way as all the other evacuees, we gathered at a certain reception center, like in this case it was a church, and from there we took what we could carry and we were put on trucks and we were taken to the center, assembly center, Pomona. Fortunately, we were one of the -- I guess -- one of those families that didn't have to bear the horse stalls. We were housed in one of the military-style barracks there, although there were horse stalls in Pomona in which some of the families lived.

EO: And so you had to take things along for your baby and all that. Did you have... and what did you do with your belongings, did you store them, did you bury them, or what?

FE: Well, most of the large stuff, like cars and the truck, we sold it for pennies on the dollar, and our furniture, luckily my father had a, owned the house that they lived in, so we rented the house, but we reserved one room for our more valuable furnishings and household things and kept it in there and locked it up. Unfortunately, when we came back, that was broken into and whoever had rented the place had ransacked the place and there wasn't too much left that was any good. So we moved in with them and from -- yeah. We moved in with them and stayed there for, I forget exactly how many weeks, but until the, we were evacuated to the assembly centers. And at the assembly center we were all housed in one room from May until August. And after August, around the 9th of August, I believe, we were loaded onto trains and took the slow ride to Wyoming.

EO: Describe your state of mind, your state of mind and how you perceived, like, the way other evacuees were feeling at the time.

FE: Well, I, speaking for myself, I just, it was sort of unbelievable, because I never thought that we would be evacuated. We figured maybe something might happen to our parents, but I was, I really felt that we wouldn't be mistreated in that particular way. As far as the due process and all that, we weren't sophisticated and didn't know anything about that, but we didn't think that we would be shipped along with the so-called "enemy aliens" at all. So we, it was kind of a very frustrating and disappointing time.

EO: So you didn't have any thoughts, then, of resisting?

FE: Actually not. We knew it was a military order and we figured that there was nothing that we could do as far as evacuation was concerned. As I said, we weren't very sophisticated in matters of the law and we figured that our leaders, such as the American, that Japanese American Citizens League that had been promoting that we cooperate and evacuate and not make any trouble, so we figured they knew best, they were the attorneys and the doctors and the well-educated people. So that and plus the fact that it was a military order, we figured there was nothing you could do, just go along with what had to be done.