<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So now I'm going to jump ahead and ask you about Pearl Harbor, and ask you, where were you when you first heard about the attack at Pearl Harbor?

NA: It was a Sunday morning, I was studying in my dormitory room, and one of the other Caucasian -- well, I was the only Japanese in that dormitory along with Kobayashi. But anyway, while I was studying that morning, one of the dormitory fellows said, "Hey, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor." And I says, "Oh, that can't be true," I said. Just a few years before, they had a big scare that the Martians were gonna invade the world and all that kind of stuff, and I said, "Oh, I'm quite sure," I told that kid that, "it's just nothing but propaganda." So I just brushed it aside until I went to class the next day, and sure enough, the professor in the physics class said, "Now, I want you guys to leave Nelson alone, because he's one of us." And sure enough, it was just like that all the time I was attending school in the class there.

TI: Well, when your, when your professor said that, "Leave Nelson alone," what were you thinking? Because then you realized that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Can you recall some of your thoughts at that point?

NA: Beg your pardon?

TI: What were you thinking when that happened?

NA: Oh, I don't think I gave it too much of a thought, other than that we're in war with Japan. Because my mind was always on studying, studying, studying, and it didn't slow me down a bit.

TI: So when you were able to talk to your parents or your family, what were they thinking? Did you ever talk to them about what would happen to the family?

NA: No. In fact, while I was in school, I didn't know what was going on in the outside world, because I never went uptown, I never read the newspaper, I never communicated with my family until in April, I said, "Wow, that's strange. I'm the only Japanese American left on campus." And so that's when I called home, they had a telephone by then. And so they said, I talked to my brother and my brother said, "Come home right away." So that was in the morning, and so I packed everything --

TI: So Nelson, before we go there, I have to ask you again, so this is April of 1942. So by this time, there were, I think, curfews and travel restrictions on Japanese Americans, and you didn't know about any of those?

NA: I didn't know anything. Like I said, I didn't know what was going on in the outside world.

TI: So no one, no one told you, or...

NA: Nobody told me.

TI: That's amazing.

NA: There were no Japanese Americans to talk to to see what they were doing.

TI: Well, what happened to Kobayashi? You said there was another student in the dorm.

NA: Oh, Kobayashi went home for Christmas vacation, and I went home on Christmas vacation, but we never did talk about the war. In fact, I guess when I went home, it was just for maybe a week or so, and everything was normal. They weren't preparing to get evacuated or anything, but it was... and then so I went back to school because I thought... because nobody said, "Don't go back." But when I went back, Roy Kobayashi didn't come back, and he never did come pick up his belongings. He just up and left, went home for Christmas vacation and never came back. And then I guess the other Japanese American students probably did the same, same thing. After they went back home, they didn't come back. And the reason why my folks weren't too excited of being, just being sent to camp was because we were two, we lived two hundred miles inland, and Kobayashi lived in San Jose. And those people were evacuated to go to assembly center before the people in Lindsay, two hundred miles inland, even got a notice to evacuate. So I'm quite sure most of the Japanese Americans at Cal Poly lived along the coast, they were evacuated, and so they didn't have a chance to come back. And, but I was two hundred miles inland, and my folks said, "Oh, we're two hundred miles inland, we're not gonna get evacuated out."

Therefore, in December when I went home for Christmas, they weren't too worried. But from December 'til April, then that's when my folks said, "Hey, looks like we're gonna get evacuated, so they were getting prepared to evacuate. And when I, in April when I called home and they said to come back, come home right away, I went home right away. And when I got home from the second day, I found out that they were selling the property, everything, because we would get evacuated out in whenever time, whatever time that we were to be given. We didn't know exactly when we were gonna get evacuated.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.