Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: George Yoshinaga Interview
Narrator: George Yoshinaga
Interviewer: Alisa Lynch
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Date: August 10, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-ygeorge_5-01-0006

<Begin Segment 6>

AL: Did the FBI visit your house?

GY: Yes, took away all my brother's rifles and things of that nature.

AL: Were you there when they came?

GY: Yes.

AL: What do you remember about that?

GY: And being at that age I was kind of confused because I was raised, born and raised as an American, I never considered that the kind of things the FBI told us. And at that time we first sensed this thing before they talked about evacuation because we started talking among ourselves that there was a rumor that they were going to put us into camps, this is long before Roosevelt signed the order to evacuate Japanese Americans.

AL: Right.

[Interruption]

AL: So we were talking about the FBI coming to your house?

GY: Yeah.

AL: How many agents came?

GY: Three.

AL: What do you remember about them?

GY: Well, I thought they were pretty arrogant. But the situation being was we just had to go the "yes sir," "no sir" route.

AL: Did your mother understand what was going on?

GY: Yeah, I think it affected them a lot more than we Niseis.

AL: What did you think was going to happen to your mother being a Japanese citizen?

GY: Well, the thing that really upset me the most was that she wasn't in good health. And so when we were evacuated it was really tough on her especially when we went from Santa Anita to Heart Mountain, that was about a three day two night and they didn't have Pullmans or anything, we sat upright in the train for that many days. And I could just sense how she deteriorated.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright &copy; 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.