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MN: Now let me get into the war years. Let me ask you, what were you doing on Sunday, December 7, 1941?

SO: We were probably playing. We heard the news over the radio. It was quite a traumatic experience for, I guess, most Japanese Niseis or Isseis. You know, we never expected it.

MN: What was your reaction to the news?

SO: Well, I think it initially was sort of shame, being that we were associated with Japan through our ethnicity, so we couldn't understand why Japan would invade the United States.

MN: Next day was a Monday. Did you go to school?

SO: Yeah, I went to school. A lot of my friends decided not to go because they were afraid of what the reaction of students might be, but I went and they were, they were polite. There were a few jokes about being Japanese, but other than that it was no different, a no different day.

[Interruption]

MN: So after Pearl Harbor, how did that affect your father's job?

SO: Well, after Pearl Harbor they set a limit as to how far you could travel -- I think it was five miles -- and that decimated my father's livelihood because he'd have to travel to, like Gardena, where he was building a nursery. So that really limited my father's working hours, and we had no income. In fact, we had just bought a refrigerator from Sears, so we stopped payment on it because we didn't know what was going to happen and they repossessed it.

MN: Now, at the end of February '42 the Japanese Americans on Terminal Island were kicked off. Did any of them come and live in your neighborhood?

SO: Not that I can recall. We did have a lady and her older daughter, grown up daughter, that came to live with us, because they wanted to go to wherever... well, I don't know why they came, but they came on the pretense of their being my father's sister, but they eventually went to Manzanar with us.

MN: What about your older brother? What happened to him?

SO: Well, he naturally had to quit, quit going to college. He had to, his, he started his freshman year at Berkeley and he came back to live with us.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.