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MN: So let's get into the war years. What were you doing on that Sunday, December 7, 1941?

MO: I think we were playing outside, or maybe we were playing in the front room. We were doing something, and then we heard that on the radio. And the radio was in the living room, and it was the strangest thing because we didn't understand what it meant. And I remember looking at my parents, and my father was very stoic, but my mother was, appeared to be shocked, something she didn't always show. And we didn't know what to do. And then, I don't know if it was a Monday or Tuesday, but these guys in suits and ties and hats came into our house, and they took the shortwave receiver. And my father had cameras, and then we had Awamura-san's sword that they took. And I can't remember what else... they took a .22 rifle that we had, and probably some other things, but those are the things that I remember. But we, I think that's when I started becoming afraid. I'm not sure, because there were very few things I was afraid of, even to this day. But there was, maybe it was uncertainty. Then my father was saying that he couldn't drive a certain distance from the house anymore. And we couldn't go to Little Tokyo anymore.

[Interruption]

MN: So the, I guess the FBI came into your house and they confiscated some stuff.

MO: Yeah, I think they were the FBI, I assume so, because they had some suits on.

MN: How did things change at your school?

MO: Well, the Chinese in my class, Maurice, I started to hit him all the time. Well, not all the time, but I just kind of bullied him around. And he came to school one day and he had this sign around his neck that said, "I am Chinese." And I noticed there was a different attitude towards me. I didn't get to play on the same teams that I used to play on at recess. I was a reasonably good athlete, so I used to get picked first, and later on I'd get picked last. I still played with the same people on the playground, but there's a noticeable change. And I didn't understand what it was at the time. Now I know, but not at the time.

MN: Then all these Japanese American families started to bring luggage to your house. Why?

MO: That was in April. Because we were less than a block away from where we had to get on the buses for Manzanar. The only federal government building other than the post office was the social security office, and that's where we had to assemble. That was two and a half blocks away from our house. So people would bring their stuff to our house, and suddenly we had this house full of nimotsu that belonged to other people. You know, when you're a little kid you kind of complain about it. And I remember lots of people during that time coming to talk to my father. And part of it had to do with my father being proficient in English. And people would always come over to our house with papers and documents. And we'd heard that Mr. Murakami, Murakami-sensei, had been arrested. He was the judo instructor, and our Japanese school teacher had been arrested. And I used to think, "How come my father didn't get arrested?" And later on I learned that nowhere was he an officer in any organization, nowhere. But had he been, he might have been a treasurer or something in an organization, he would have gotten arrested, and they would have locked him up because he was fluent in English. He would be viewed maybe as an uppity person or whatever they viewed them as. But it was what existed.

MN: Did you understand when your parents -- how did you learn that you had to go into this thing called camp?

MO: My mother told us we were going to camp, and said, "We've got to buy some clothes for you." I remember going to Karl's shoe store, she bought us some boots. We never had boots before. And then she knitted us some caps, because my mother always knitted, and she knitted us some mittens. And we got a hat that had flaps on it. And so for the first time, we had two pairs of shoes. And I thought, oh, well, we're going to camp, because with the church we'd gone to Y camp, we'd gone to Catalina Island to Camp Fox and one other place up in the mountains, I can't remember where it was. But yeah, so to us, it was going to be a brand new adventure. And at that time my mother was pregnant, so it was, she didn't know what was going to happen. Later on, she would talk about that time to me, not to other people, and how filled with anxiety she was, that she didn't know what was gonna happen with the baby, and what was gonna happen to us, whether we could ever get an education in this country. It was just one of those things.

MN: Now yourself, how did you pack?

MO: Well, we were told what we could take. We had to take bedding, and we had to take utensils. Those were the mandatory items. And my mother put out a sheet, and she said, "Put everything in there that you can carry and we'll bundle it up. And so we put our things in there, and then we put our family number on the outside in India ink and then tied the knots. I can't remember, maybe it was three feet by three feet, I don't remember how big it was. All I know is that's what we had because we didn't have suitcases. And each of us, my two brothers, my father and I, maybe my father had a suitcase, I'm not sure. But that was, it was a hard time in our lives. I think the worst part was the uncertainty, because I'm certain that there were people who believed that we were gonna be executed. And I asked my mother about that once, if she ever thought about that, and she thought about it, but she thought it wouldn't happen. But she thought about it.

MN: What did you have to do with your dogs and your rabbits?

MO: I don't know what we did with our rabbits. Our dog, we gave away. We gave Ginger away, and we gave Fluffy away to some people that were across the vacant lot over on Cypress Street. They took Ginger and Fluffy. I didn't miss Ginger that much, because Ginger was, he was just a rascally dog. He'd bite people. But the cat was really tough. We had found this kitten, we were up at Stough Park I guess it's called, up in the mountains, Mountain Avenue, and we found this kitten with the tail cut off. We brought it home, and because it was so fluffy, we called it Fluffy. And that cat got bigger and bigger and meaner and meaner. It wasn't mean to any of us, but it was mean to the other dogs. And one day I saw this cat was actually on the back of a dog, claws dug into the dog, the dog was running, the cat was on it. Might have been ten, twelve years later, and we had this cat book. And we come to this one page, and I see Fluffy. And Fluffy wasn't a cat, Fluffy was a Manx. But we just thought she was a big cat. We didn't know any better. You know, when you're a kid growing up in Burbank, what do you know about Manx? It's a breed that comes from the Isle of Man in the English Channel. But apparently it was a very valuable cat; we just found it, and finders keepers.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.