<Begin Segment 11>

MN: Now, when you were going into camp, do you remember the month or the day that you went in?

MO: It was the end of April, yeah, probably this time of the month, seventy years ago. I don't know the exact date. Bo keeps telling me what day it was, and I keep forgetting. But, see, they went on the same day, all the people in the San Fernando Valley went on the same day. We had a caravan of buses. And what they had were these red buses that were operated by the Pacific Electric Company, that's what we got loaded on. And then there were a couple of buses from Asbury Rapid Transit, which was the bus company that went from San Fernando downtown. We were in a Pacific Electric bus. I remember the people that came from West L.A. were on Santa Monica Bus Line buses. They had no bathrooms or anything, they were really just regular transit buses. Yeah, it was not comfortable. People told me that they made us close the shades, but I don't remember that. All I know is that we were lonely because our mother didn't come with us. She had been sent to the prison ward at County Hospital awaiting the birth of my brother. So my father and two brothers went.

MN: Did any of your non-Nikkei friends come and say goodbye?

MO: Uh-huh.

MN: How did that make you feel?

MO: I'm trying to think how it made me feel. I guess I was glad that they were there to say goodbye, but there weren't many of them. Many of them said goodbye to me in school. It was a day in the midweek that we had to get on the buses. I don't remember exactly what day it was. Later on I went to the Burbank public library, and there was a lady there that was very helpful, and let me look at the archives of the Burbank Daily Review. And nowhere is there an article about our being shipped out. And then I looked at the L.A. Times and they had a couple things about, that there'd be people who would be sent away who were Japanese Americans, but there was no specific date that I could discern.

MN: So you're gathering at this social security building.

MO: On the outside, yeah. There were soldiers with helmets and rifles.

MN: How did you feel towards the soldiers?

MO: Well, you have a certain amount of fear, because they had rifles. I don't know if they were loaded. They might have been, they might not have been, but they were in uniform. And I remember distinctly them having the leggings on. They had leggings, and they had those little tin hats they used in World War I, and they were big. But other than that, we just got on the buses. I don't remember much about the trip other than I had to take a pee and couldn't, because there was no place to stop. Eventually we had one stop, and later on I learned that was the Little Lake Hotel. All I remember is that where we stopped, there were a lot of cobblestones on the side of the building. And there were only two places that had those cobblestones, one is in Soledad Canyon, there's a restaurant there that has those big stream boulders along the side. And then the Little Lake Hotel, which is no longer there.

MN: So mostly likely you stopped at the Little Lake Hotel.

MO: That's what Bo tells me.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.