Densho Digital Archive - Sumiko Yamauchi Interview (denshovh-ysumiko

<Begin Segment 7>

WP: Do you remember the moment you found out that you were gonna have to leave home and leave the exclusion zone? Or do you remember being told that you were gonna have to leave home?

SY: Well, like I said, I was ready to go. I mean, when they said, well, you were going to... they never came and told us, nobody handcuffed us, nobody came and told us anything. It was all written in the newspaper or mailed to you. So you just talked to the neighbors if they were Japanese and see what are you gonna do or what do you think is gonna happen, and we just went with that. We didn't know what our future was, and they said on certain-certain day your family would wear this little tag with a number on it, and the, I think it was a Greyhound bus, dozens and dozens of them, and you had to go walk down and see where your number matched this bus that you were on. And we were all, fortunately we were all in the same bus. And we were, we kind of knew where Manzanar was, but we didn't know what it was like. And so it was scary in a way, but it was, I was so dumb, it was an adventurous day. We were looking forward to something different.

WP: Were your parents as ready to go as you were, or how did they feel about the situation?

SY: Well, they had no choice, because they were not an American citizen. So they felt that they had, they'd just go along with what the rest of 'em were going to do, and like I said, they were on the telephone talking to each other. And they said, well, what can we do? We just have to go. And, of course, we were underage so we went with my mother and father. And to me, I just felt... wonder what Manzanar's going to be like. And when we got there, we had one of those storms. Oh, god, that was horrible.

WP: Did your family own property?

SY: No. They couldn't because they were not American citizens, and we were all underage so we couldn't own.

WP: What did you do with the things that you did own?

SY: The man, there was a man that came from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and he said that he was, wanted to buy the flower shop. And my mother and father said, whatever is here, the vases, the stand, and all the scissors and all the papers and the refrigerator and all this, you could have it, but let me stay until we go to camp. And if on the day that we go into camp, if you will drive us to the station, Greyhound station or the park or wherever it was. And so that's how we were able to do what we did. We didn't own it, we were just renting, we couldn't take anything. We only have, they said that we can only take one suitcase per person.

WP: Was there any money exchanged between your parents and this man?

SY: I don't think they were. We did run the flower shop, and the man's name was Mr. Waters. And he was there to kind of... I don't think there was any money. We were just lucky that he was going to let us stay there until the very last, because he was already, it was understood by the owner of the building that he was gonna take over and that it was his flower shop, but he let us stay there until the very last. So I think it was sort of an understanding.

WP: I think you mentioned a car that your family owned, right?

SY: My father had just bought an old truck, and I think he did make a few dollars out of that. But in those days you could buy a car for five hundred dollars, you know, or was it even less than that maybe?

WP: Did you have to leave anything behind that you were sad to lose?

SY: Uh-uh.

WP: Was it difficult to decide what to bring and what not to bring?

SY: Yeah, because we only had one suitcase. You didn't know what... you didn't know what the condition was in Manzanar. At the same time, you only had one suitcase, so they did tell us we couldn't take any tools, no guns, no knives, no camera, none of that kind of thing. But that's... in those days, suitcase is not fancy like that. It's a cardboard box, you know. And it didn't have anything... and it was just a cardboard box, you know, nothing fancy, and you couldn't get too much into it. And that's what you took, that's what we took, just the clothes we had.