Densho Digital Archive - John Nakada Interview (denshovh-njohn-01-0010)

<Begin Segment 10>

RP: How did your family prepare for, quote, the "evacuation"? What did you do with the farm, the house, if you can recall any details with preparation?

JN: See, I was eleven years old so I really didn't know too much but when I talk to my brothers they kind of told me a little bit about what happened. And so we had about less than two weeks to take care of everything and go to Pomona Assembly Center and the farm was in my brother's name so the government couldn't take it away from them.

RP: Oldest brother?

JN: Oldest brother's name. He was an American citizen so they didn't take it away from us. But if it was in my father's name, which some of them had... they were not allowed to even buy property, see, but some of them did anyway and they lost everything. But we didn't lose anything, we still had a farm, we still had a home. So that's basically what happened. And for myself my mother said, "You can only take what you can carry," so... a suitcase... so you just take clothes, that's all you can take, no toys, you know, no bikes, no nothing. And you couldn't take any pets, no dogs or cats or anything. So that kind of made me sad because, you know, you kind of get attached to a dog and a cat, you know, a pet in the house, it's amazing. We had a cat called... we call her Mama Kitty because every year she would have a litter of kittens. [Laughs] So she was Mama Kitty, that's her name, Mama Kitty. Isn't that crazy? And so what I did was I liked marbles so I hid a bunch of marbles in the pockets of my pants so that was the only toy I took to camp, if you call that a toy, I don't know if it's a toy or not. That's just my own personal experience of what I did and the adults, you know, they had other things. And two of my brothers were drafted before Pearl Harbor, they were in the army. And so it was crazy that I learned later that when December 7th happened all Japanese were considered "enemy aliens," and the army classified them as 4-C not 1-A, "enemy aliens," so my two brothers that were in the army, already in the army, they said, "You can't train anymore. You had to just do menial duty, you had to pick up papers, you have to clean the toilets, you have to..." when my brothers told me that, it was crazy, I thought. So these are some of the things, stories that I heard from my brothers.

RP: So they were drafted before?

JN: They were drafted, yes, before the war.

RP: Do where they were when the war broke out? What camp they were in?

JN: They were in... see, what's that camp up north, northern California?

RP: Fort Ord?

JN: Fort Ord, right, Fort Ord.

RP: And that would have been... which brothers were they?

JN: That was Yoshinao and Saburo, the second and third. Yoshio they didn't draft him because he had to take care of the family.

RP: Were they any other siblings that had already moved out or married by that time?

JN: No, they moved out but they were not in the area, they were going to college or school or something and so there were only about eight of us that went into camp, the younger ones.

RP: That's a great story about that sneaking the marbles in. Who did you leave your cat with, you also had a dog too?

JN: Neighbors took care of them.

RP: And who took over the farm while you were gone, do you recall?

JN: Well, we had a banker that said he would manage it and so that's what happened there and so he took care of the taxes and, you know, whatever had to be done on the farm.