<Begin Segment 11>

KL: Did you get any information or any guidance from the government or from anyone else about preparing to leave?

HF: Pardon me?

KL: Did you get any guidance from the government or from anyone else, from, you know, the church or your Japanese school teacher or anybody about how to prepare to leave your home?

HF: I don't remember that.

KL: How did you personally prepare to go?

HF: Oh, just... we didn't have any pants, so my mother bought us some slacks. And then she got us a hat, they said it's hot in Manzanar, that's where we're going. So she got us a hat and we got some pants, because it's a desert out there, so we needed pants. That's about all.

KL: Did you say goodbyes to people or do you remember...

HF: No, we couldn't say goodbye, just our neighbor that was close. Because we lived... everybody was so far away.

KL: Why couldn't you say goodbye?

HF: Well, I couldn't get there.

KL: Just the distance was too great?

HF: Uh-huh.

KL: So you knew Manzanar was hot, and it was the desert. What else did you know about it?

HF: That's all we knew. There's going to be scorpions they told us, so be careful.

KL: Who did you hear that from?

HF: You know how rumors fly.

KL: So just like neighbors or other people?

HF: Whatever it must have been.

KL: What happened to your, to the staff of the Japanese school after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? Was anyone in your community visited?

HF: Well, most of them lived in Los Angeles, and they used to come from Los Angeles every Saturday just to teach us, and then to go back.

KL: Did you hear -- oh, go ahead.

HF: So they probably went to camp someplace, I don't know where.

KL: You didn't hear from them or about them, that they had been arrested? You don't know what happened?

HF: No. My uncle and aunt, they were arrested. They were put into a different camp. So then my cousin came to live with us in camp.

KL: Did she join you before you went to camp?

HF: I guess she did, she must have. Because she was alone, my brother had to go to West Los Angeles to close up her house, because she had nobody. So he had to drive to West Los Angeles and close the house for them.

KL: How did you learn that he needed to do that, or that...

HF: Through the paper, through the newspaper.

KL: Oh, really? That's how you learned that he had been arrested?

HF: Oh, yeah.

KL: Did he say what your cousin's state of mind was when he got there?

HF: No. At that time a lot of people got arrested and put into different camps.

KL: Do you know where your aunt and uncle were sent?

HF: I think Crystal City, Texas. And then they were released and they came to Manzanar. And then that's when my cousin, they got their own apartment.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.