<Begin Segment 5>

RP: Do you have any remembrance of, you know, the day the war broke out, Pearl Harbor was bombed? How did you hear about it?

KK: Well, I was roller skating and it seemed strange because there was no one out and about because generally there were a lot of people, you know, out in their yards. There was a stillness about that day that I remember even as a child. And I remember visiting that lady, the young woman that had the baby, and she said... she told me to go home. She said, "I think you'd better go home," so I went home and that was the last time I saw her because she went to a different camp. Her name was Mae, M-A-E. Mae Suto. But, you know, and that's all I remember. But I remember the curtains having to be drawn, you know the, what do they call them?

RP: Blackout.

KK: Blackout curtains.

RP: Do you remember the next day at school at all? Were you treated differently by classmates?

KK: No, I don't remember that at all. But right after the... well, it was right around Christmas so after the Christmas holiday I don't believe we went back to school. I think, you know, I don't think we went back to school after the holiday. But I regretted not being able to go back because we had a bunny in our classroom and I, you know, I enjoyed petting it and things. I don't believe we went back to school.

RP: And you don't know why that... why you didn't go back to school?

KK: No, we didn't go back.

RP: So from the time, after the holidays 'til you went to camp, you were not in school.

KK: Yeah, I don't know whether that was, you know, everyone or whether it was just myself but it may have been the whole community.

RP: Sawtelle was --

KK: A large population, large Japanese American population.

RP: Do you remember other groups as well?

KK: You mean playmates?

RP: Yeah, playmates, who did you play with, did you play with Caucasian kids or Japanese American kids?

KK: Just kids on the block or around the block. That part is kind of fuzzy, I don't remember it until my parents had to start, you know, selling off their things. I had gotten a piano for my sixth birthday, you know, the previous January, early in January, this was December, and they had to sell that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.