<Begin Segment 8>

RP: So what happened to your family after you realized that you were gonna be evacuated? Can you describe for us the process of trying to get ready to leave --

SY: Oh, I see.

RP: -- the farms and...

SY: Through, through my brother's effort and through the manager of the Cortez Growers Association, Mr. Morofuji, Mr. Sakaguchi, Mr. Taniguchi, all the people, the elders got together and tried to find a solution as to what would be best to, to save their property, as the time permitted, and they never knew when you're gonna be home. So we hired a manager named Momberg and he took charge of the, the acreages of Cortez, Livingston, Cressy, and some in Delhi, I think. So there were, there were close to almost 10,000 acres he had control of. And he did a good job. He did a tremendous job. I don't know how he harvested everything, but he, he was able to do it. And when 1946, when the war, when Mom came back, we were able to come back to the property if we wanted to. And at that time, when we come after Mother at, at the, at the community hall there she's... there was nobody else to look after her so they brought her back over there. And when we went to pick her up and Mr. Morimoto, the man that chased the Shimizus out of their property, told my brother, "Why in the hell are you back over here? Why are you back in Cortez? Are you intending to live here? You've got no right to come back over here." My brother got so angry. He never went back to Cortez again.

RP: But you had...

SY: But then we had a piece of property there.

RP: You had a piece of property. So what happened to that?

SY: Well...

RP: Did you sell it, or...

SY: I would say it was in weeds for a long time. The members of the community always said that they'd go down to our property and go hunt pheasants and stuff like that because it was all in weeds. But through the years, Hiroshi Asai, which is a neighbor right east of us on that one 40 acres, is a brother to Kiyoshi, started to buy a piece of property and then he planted almonds there and he's quite a successful farmer now. Yeah.

RP: Was Mr. Morimoto's belligerence or anger, when you mentioned that he...

SY: I don't know why. I cannot say why. It's just his natural...

RP: Did it have anything at all to do with, with your position on resisting the draft? Did he know about that?

SY: No, none whatsoever.

RP: He wouldn't have known that.

SY: Yeah.

RP: Maybe it could have been a personal issue or something like that, too?

SY: I really don't know.

RP: Yeah.

SY: But he was a man that... well, probably unpredictable, yeah.

RP: Yes.

SY: But I would also like to say that during that time when we're on evacuation, many of these people as soon after the Pearl Harbor, I don't know who in the community was paid by the government to say that this guy, this guy, this guy, the teacher, the Buddhist monk, or whoever, the leader of the community, was taken to the concentration camps.

RP: Oh, the FBI...

SY: Right.

RP: ...rounded them up.

SY: But how did they know? How did the FBI know who to apprehend? Somebody had to be the point man. That I disliked very much. Yeah.

RP: Uh-huh. So yeah, you're community leaders just disappeared one day. And then you disappeared. Do you recall... how was it for you in terms of personal possessions and things of that nature?

SY: Well, I was still a youngster then. I just had the clothes on my back, you know what I mean?

RP: Uh-huh.

SY: So that, that was the score. However, to bring up an incident where my sister in law's, Michi's, my brother's wife's dad was from Puyallup, Washington, and then they were, they were successful oyster farmers, something like 500 acres of oysters. And when that war broke out, the next day he was gone. Who picked him up or who, who pointed him out? We'll never know. And he was in Missoula, Missoula, Montana, for two years and the family didn't know where he was. Never had a letter from him. They didn't, he didn't know where they were. But through, I don't know where... I think through the Red Cross that he was able to find where the family was. And one day Michi, my sister in law, was workin' at the commissary and who's standing in front of her? It's her dad.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.