Densho Digital Archive - George Matsumoto Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

<Begin Segment 8>

KP: So back to Ocean Park and... did things change at all, after Pearl Harbor? Did you see any changes? Well, aside from your father's difficulty getting to work, but attitudes toward Japanese people?

GM: No, no. That was the funniest thing. Everybody told me what hard times they had, and since we didn't have any money in the Japanese banks, they can close any bank they felt like, it didn't bother us. But other people in other cities, told me that their neighbors turned on 'em and people at school stopped talking to 'em, but I didn't see anything like that. My neighbors were all still friendly and the people at school never said a word.

KP: So when the evacuation notice came out, what did you, what did you think about that?

GM: Well, we, we didn't know exactly what was going on, but that's the edict from the government said, "Hey, you're gonna move." What can you do? There's nothing we can do.

KP: Did your father come back from Los Angeles at that time to stay with the family?

GM: He, he worked until about the week before, 'cause that was money in his pocket.

KP: And then what did he do?

GM: He came back and we just did our final packing and left.

KP: What did you do with your, the rest of your stuff you couldn't take with you?

GM: Oh, we sold some of the stuff, but most of that stuff we gave to the neighbor next door. He was a good friend of ours. He was a, more like a second father to us. He used to take us to the snow country, Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead and somewhere on Santa Ana River, way back when. During the summer we used to go swimming in a spring. You could feel the cold water coming out from the bottom. He was like a father to us. In fact, he converted all of us to Christianity. We were all Methodists at one time. He was an elder in the Methodist church and they had a storefront church on Broadway and Second Street or somewhere around there, in Santa Monica. It was part of the Salvation Army. So he gave me a Bible and that's what I took to Manzanar when we got interned.