Densho Digital Archive - Richard M. Murakami Interview (denshovh-mrichard

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LP: So what about the move to Florin? What do you remember about that?

RM: Moving to Florin? When we moved to Florin, we lived in, a church had a big auditorium, so I think there were about four or five families lived in there, so we separated, like, called it a room or whatever, by stringing a rope and hanging blankets, and that's out of the four or five families, I can't remember how many. But that's how we separated our space when we lived there. And we lived there until we were put into the camp.

LP: Do you remember the, sort of filtering through the things that your family owned, and taking certain things or feeling anything about having to leave certain things behind?

RM: Okay, yeah. When we left here, Lakewood, my father was a farmer, so we loaded up the truck with everything we had, and moved it up to Florin because we thought we were gonna stay in Florin. So we had everything with us. So when they made us go to camp, we took all of our belongings and put it into my uncle's basement, so what's where we stored it. And then my father sold the truck, but he kept the car, he stored the car, luckily. But everything else was stored in my uncle's basement, which we lost anyway. That's another story. So all our belongings we took with us except for one thing. My father had just purchased a Caterpillar diesel, that was the one thing he wanted, he just purchased, he must have had it less than six months, so he stored it in a warehouse in the water company. And can I tell you a little story about that? He stored it in the warehouse, and while we were in camp, our good friend, his name was Whitey Searing, Whitey wrote to my father and said, "You know, why leave the Caterpillar in the warehouse and just let it sit there? Why don't you lease it out to the person that's farming your land?" Not our land, but the land that's now being farmed by someone else. "Why don't you lease it to them? I'll take care of it for you." So he leased, took care of the lease of the Caterpillar for my father. He collected the rent and everything, and so then we had a little bit of money while we were in camp. And when we came back, Whitey gave my father every single penny from that. And my father tried to give him something, Whitey refused to take a penny, and that's how good he was, he refused to take a penny. And when I say there were some really good people that we knew, and he was one of those people, and we were grateful to him. And also, during the war, between the war, I had two brothers. My older brother and younger brother gone to Japan in January of 1941, they were in Hiroshima. That's another story.

But they were in Hiroshima and Whitey's son-in-law was a lieutenant in the army when he went to Japan. The first thing he did he went to Hiroshima, even though they weren't supposed to, he went to Hiroshima to look for my two brothers. He found them, and the first thing he did was he went to the U.S. authorities and he told them, "These two kids are to be on the first boat back to the United States." So my two brothers and my cousin were on the first boat back to the United States. So we were so lucky with knowing these people.