<Begin Segment 9>

RP: December 7, 1941.

YW: Right. The first rule they passed on him was, "You're an alien, you can't live within so many miles of a defense plant."

RP: And that was (east) of...

YW: (East) of Grumman, maybe less than a mile, mile and a half away, and the limit was five miles. How's a guy gonna ranch his flowers from five miles away? Well, what he did was, they said, "You can't be there at night. You can be there during the day." So he transported his sorting and processing to another facility and he went there during the daytime and left before it got dark.

RP: Which facility was that?

YW: Okay, the way that worked out was when the war broke out, when they got this five mile limit restriction, he had to figure out somewhere else to go live. We couldn't all live there at night, so there was a Japanese language school in Gardena, and today I'm guessing it's at about 125th or -30th and Broadway. There was a big area under the power lines or whatever, this Japanese man started a language school and a lot of the local people sent their kids there, but when the war broke out he had to stop everything and the buildings were empty. So he heard about the plight of all these people, so he offered the use of his facilities for temporary housing, so we used the classrooms for housing. Now, there was three families that ended up there. On the corner of Crenshaw and El Segundo Boulevard there was an elderly couple that used to grow specimen trees for the nursery business, and his specialty was trees. He and his wife moved into the Japanese language school, and then the person that helped us out, get the trailer court, was from Terminal Island. He had to leave overnight, so he moved into the Japanese language school, and among his family he had a son that was (...) my age, so we became playmates. And eventually, (a few months) later, his family ended up in Manzanar, my family ended up in Rohwer -- or Santa Anita first, then Rohwer -- whereas he didn't, he didn't go to Santa Anita. He went directly from there to Manzanar.

RP: And the irony was that, I guess, the authorities said that your mother could live on the farm because she was a citizen.

YW: She's an American citizen, right? You like that? You could do that. How's she gonna do anything? It was tough, tough, tough.

RP: And so what was life like for you in that time that you, you lived out in this school?

YW: So we had to change schools, grammar school. We found another grammar school to go to. We went there maybe a period of six months, temporarily, and then we all got incarcerated after that. So by February, March time period the following year, '42, we were all being rustled off to camps. I ended up in Santa Anita, temporary quarters. I got to live in the stables. (My wife) got to live in the barracks on the parking lot. She says she was a high tone person so they put her in the parking lot. [Laughs]

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.