<Begin Segment 13>

RP: I wanted to ask you about other, any other restrictions. Now, your dad was no longer farming at that time, right? You were living in Florin, in the community.

TK: Yeah. So, well, anyway --

RP: What emotions, Tommy, did you experience when you found out that your family was going to be excluded, evacuated from Florin?

TK: Well, only thing we said was, "Well, you just have to wait to see what happens, what the government wanted us to do." That's about it. And my dad and my two sisters, at that time, they were, strawberry was just ready come out, so people were looking for workers to pick strawberries. So they went to help out the neighbors or whatever, so they went to work over there until we got word that we got to register.

RP: Now, some of your older sisters, had they already married and left?

TK: No, no. Well, the oldest one, Bertha, she had married earlier, but she died early, see, of some kidney...

RP: She died before the war.

TK: Yeah, before the war. She died in... see, I was a freshman, so she might have died in '39 or '40. She was only married about a couple of years, she didn't have any children or anything.

RP: So the... when the evacuation finally hit Florin, they used the railroad tracks as kind of a dividing line.

TK: Yeah. Right through the middle of town. We all thought we were going to go together, then when we read the thing, he says, "Hey, we're supposed to go to Marysville Assembly Center." And these other guys, they said, oh, they got to go to Fresno. We thought we all were gonna go to Fresno or something. He says, "Oh, man."

RP: You had relatives from the east side of the railroad tracks.

TK: Yeah, all the... they went to Fresno. We went to whatchacall, Marysville. But funny thing is, I had relatives Marysville, but they were in a different zone. They weren't affected at that time. See, we went to Marysville camp, we only stayed there one month, which, to me, was stupid. Why go all the way to... why don't we send it to Tule Lake, direct, just for one month? But anyway, we went to Marysville, and they asked, they called and said, "If you need anything," my relatives. "Yeah, we need a washboard. They didn't tell us to... just bring your clothes." Well, we found out that you had to wash your own clothes, so you need the old fashioned... so we told them to send us a washboard and a washtub or whatever. And then when we went to Tule Lake, we stopped at the town, and they were outside. They came to see us. So we talked to them from the train. Then later on, they joined us at Tule Lake. [Laughs] At that time, they weren't affected.

RP: Which relatives were these?

TK: That's my dad's niece and her family.

RP: Were living around Marysville?

TK: Yeah, right in the town of Marysville.

RP: You mentioned earlier, because the railroad kind of divided up the community, there were people kind of moving back and forth to try to join up with each other.

TK: Yeah. Like my relatives said, move over to their side, see. It's only for a couple of days, then we'd go together. You have to register, though. But says, "Well, we don't want to leave the minister by himself," so he says... of course, there were other members of our church there, but we were kind of close. So he says, "No, we'll go with them." So we went. So in Marysville, we were right next to the barrack. Not barrack, but the next apartment.

RP: To the minister?

TK: Yeah. And in Tule Lake, we were the next block away. Then I think... I'm trying to figure out... I only stayed in Tule Lake one year. We went, in '43, I said, "I gotta get out of here." I don't like the food, I don't care for... I said, well, you had to get a job to get out. So I'm looking every day, and said, "Well, there's a dishwashing job in the Hotel Sherman in Chicago," that's one of the bigger hotels. I'll go, I don't care about anything else. So I applied for this, they said, "Yeah, come on down." So I went. I was supposed to, somebody was supposed to meet me at the station, nobody was there. [Laughs] I go there, I said, "Hey, where am I supposed to go?" But before then, I'd heard from people that a lot of 'em stayed at the YMCA hotel on Wabash. So I'd go outside and I asked the cab driver, "Hey, take me to YMCA." "Oh," he says, "I've taken a lot of you fellows over there." He said, "Yeah, I'll take you over there," so he took us, took me over there and got me registered.

RP: Tommy, let's just backtrack a little bit. Your family basically followed the minister.

TK: Yeah.

RP: What was his name?

TK: Yonosuke, wasn't it? Yonosuke, Y-O-N-O-S-U-K-E, Sasaki. S-A-S-A-K-I.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.