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NB: When we first... well, Pearl Harbor was sort of the beginning. But before that, there were harbingers, the Issei were all forced to register. The Alien Registration Act took place and I had to take my parents down to the post office to have their pictures taken and register their thumb prints.

Then when the war came, we listened to all the same programs on the radio, although we have to get rid of the shortwave immediately. Walter Winchell spent a lot of time denigrating us and making us spies and traitors. And he was the one that was foremost among the media people who urged us to be evacuated, that the government do this because we were such dangerous people. We were going to poison the water supply and we would be signaling to submarines offshore because a lot of our farms were on the coast. So my parents became increasingly anxious and didn't want to plant for the next year. And then the agricultural man came by and told us we had to plant. And then he asked us what we were doing with our tools and our farm equipment and our horse and that sort of thing. And we tried to carry on, and at the same time, it was obvious that we were going to be sent away. My father had a truck which we just abandoned and we sold all the tools and the toolshed for fifteen dollars. We had a '39 Plymouth that we sold for two hundred dollars with the proviso that the man who bought it would drive us to the high school where we were supposed to congregate.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.