<Begin Segment 10>

TI: So can we back up a little bit? So December 7, 1941, do you remember that day?

KM: When the war...

TI: When the war started?

KM: Yeah, when the war started? Yeah, the FBI came and took my father.

TI: And so how quickly, how quickly did the FBI come?

KM: Oh, I wonder if it was next day. But there was a Japanese man outside watching, so we figured he must have snitched. Otherwise, how would the FBI know?

TI: And were you home when, so you saw that Japanese man?

KM: I saw, yeah. And then we...

TI: So could you describe the FBI coming into your house, as much as you can remember? Just what happened when the FBI came?

KM: We had a, he started a grocery store there. We had a grocery store. But they just came, just took him. They just took him, said he was a Black Dragon and took him to jail. We saw him in jail.

TI: When they were at your place, do you recall them looking around the store or your living quarters for anything?

KM: No, they just took him and that's it.

TI: Did they give him time to get some clothes or anything?

KM: Uh-uh.

TI: When that happened, did you have a sense of how long he might be gone or anything like that?

KM: No, we never did.

JS: So how long was he separated from your family?

KM: All during the war.

JS: The whole... wow.

KM: And then I, then when I went to Arkansas... Arkansas, yeah. That's when I wrote a lot of letters to General DeWitt. I still have the bunch of letter. [Laughs] I wrote for my father and for another man, all about how he was innocent, that he was to turn him loose. I have a whole stack of letters that I sent to President Hoover and all that, Roosevelt. I wrote to a lot of people. [Laughs] Crazy.

JS: Did you ever get any response?

KM: No, uh-huh, but I just wrote and wrote, tell him that Father was innocent. But they finally released all of 'em. But my father said, he told me that they were in New Mexico, and this Japanese man, he, they were all going in a truck, and somehow, this man, I don't know what he did, but then they just shot him in the back in New Mexico. That's one thing he remembered.

TI: Do you remember which, which camp that was?

KM: Internment camp? That was different, huh? They called it New Mexico.

JS: The Department of Justice camp? Was that...

KM: Yeah. After Sharp Park, they removed all of them to New Mexico.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho and Preserving California's Japantowns. All Rights Reserved.