<Begin Segment 9>
RP: Tell us a little bit about how your life changed after the war broke out.
RS: Well, I look at the internment experience as being the thing that changed my life completely. Before the war broke out, which there I am member of a small community, farming community and so forth, and the people in that community not only in Troutdale but also in Gresham and so forth all the farming communities, the families, the sons always kept following what their fathers did. So the farms went from the father to the sons and if there were several sons in the family then they would expand the farm and so forth. And I suppose if the internment hadn't come up I would see myself as being part of that and I don't know if I ever thought in those days of breaking away from that. That's not something that I... it just never occurred to me to think otherwise than that. Now of course when I look at what happened since the internment, my life is completely opposite of that, I mean there's no similarity whatsoever between pre and post World War II in my life. So it changed everything, it just completely.
RP: Do you remember any of the... after Pearl Harbor Japanese Americans, were singled out in a number of different ways. There were restrictions on travel and curfews and did those affect your family financially or socially in any ways?
RS: Well, it only lasted for five or six months before we got interned. We never were ones to do a lot of traveling anyway. But the traveling was from the farm to Portland. Now that was further than the travel restrictions, but if it has to do with business, taking things back and forth, that was okay, you know. And of course we never went out very much anyway so to have a curfew, that didn't change very much.
RP: One thing that you were subjected to though was the requirement that all Japanese males over the age of fourteen be fingerprinted?
RS: Yes.
RP: Can you tell us about that?
RS: Just one day we learned that we were supposed to go to the FBI office in Portland to get our fingerprints and people who were fourteen years old or more were required to get your fingerprint so we went and got fingerprinted. I suppose to make sure that none of us had some criminal record or something, or somehow or other may be able to keep track of us if something happened, then they could always trace fingerprints and so forth to make sure that it was one of us or not. I just did what was asked. Ever since that time I always say I've had an FBI file open since I was fourteen years old, you know, fifteen years old. I've had an FBI file for a long time. I often thought I ought to get a copy of my files.
RP: So at that age you didn't feel that you were being singled out?
RS: Well, not any more than they've already singled us out you know. I mean none of my classmates had to do that so you see that's it's because you're Japanese you know.
RP: Do you remember when you learned about the fact that you would be excluded from the West Coast, from your community and reactions on the part of yourself or your family about that news?
RS: I can't remember exactly but I know that I was surprised that this would happen. I mean, what I'd learned, you could see that this country was the land of freedom and this country was a land of laws. And this country, you don't get put in jail unless you do something and you get convicted of it. And here we are they say, you're right everybody who fits in this classification is going to be put away. Well, that's a surprise, that's not something, not at all what I thought the system for the United States was. When they were talking about this before it happened I said, "Well, no, they wouldn't do something like that, that's not going to happen." But then it happened so then I just felt very surprised.
<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.