<Begin Segment 3>

SN: Then I started school there in '41. As you know, the end of '41, the war broke out. It was a very unpleasant day, extremely emotionally unpleasant. Couldn't believe that war would start, they would start the war, Japan would bomb Pearl Harbor. Everybody around the dorm and so on was yelling and screaming and so on. But there were several, several students who... students that was very supportive, understand that you're American, "Don't worry about it. We know you as an American citizen even though you look like Japanese," and so on and was very supportive. Okay. General DeWitt made the order that we had to leave, and this is spring term, and we wanted to finish our term before we left. And so we went to the president as a group, all Japanese group, and I was one of the spokesmen. Two of us were spokesmen and pleaded that he write to or phone General DeWitt and allow students to finish their term before they're forced out of school because we paid for the tuition, and it just would be very disruptive. This president was a very mean person, highly prejudiced. I think his name was Webb. I'm can't swear... I know someone looked it up for me and gave it and I think it was Webb. Anyway, he was the president and said no. I went to Dean Schumacher who was the liberal arts, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts. He was really upset. He said this is terrible, so he went to the president. I went to him because I made friends with him, and he was very liberal minded. He felt very good about Japanese Americans. And he went there and pleaded, and of course the president just ignored him, that's it. So we all left, Japanese Americans left.

JC: So what is it like to experience that? I mean, here you are, you're an American. You've been living your life like everybody else, and suddenly, you're something other than that, and you're saying some people were supportive. I assume there's a flip side to that, of some people weren't supportive. What's that experience even like?

SN: Well, there is a certain amount of bitterness going through you. Bitterness that is a, and you just feel really like you've been betrayed. You were told all along that you are an American citizen, you were born here, you're just as much American citizen as a German, you know, German second generation born here or Italian born here. And you've got to remember, the war was going on already in Europe against the Italians and the Germans. And so it was very difficult. We became, many of them became very bitter. Now it all depends on how, let's say, much contact that people have with white Americans, okay, let's put it that way. I think that because I had such long contact mainly with white Americans that I didn't get that extreme bitterness that some of these other Japanese people in Southern California did where they had this group called "no-nos." They are the ones that refused to sign allegiance to U.S. and all that because, when they were in camp.

So the war broke out, and I went back home and my father was really upset, of course, because he had this business going, and then Mayor Earl Riley decided to pass an ordinance in which any Japanese cannot have a business license in Portland and took away the business license, and we had to close the store. In the meantime, of course, I told you he had these other businesses. Another business he had started was the wholesale business and started importing quite a bit of things from Japan to wholesale, and was selling mainly in the western states. He had a salesman selling goods and so on. Of course, those, the depth of the Depression hit, you know, all those years in the '30s. So we had a terrible situation where we couldn't open the store and so on. Then, let's see, the federal reserve bank sent in an auditor in to look at my father's books, and they closed up our store for two weeks with a marshal, federal marshal came in and closed... this was my father's store. Then after two months, two weeks or three weeks, they allowed to open up the store. But then Mayor Riley passed an ordinance to close down the store, well, that's that. So we lost the business completely.

Now, people wonder, we wondered what to do next. And then we had relatives, that is, my mother's sister-in-law lived in Salt Lake City. So she called up, my aunt called up and my mother and says, "Why don't you come to Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is not in the evacuation zone. You might as well get out and not go to camp," which would be terrible, you see. It's beyond me yet, to me, why the Japanese didn't get up and more of them get up and move. Quite a few did, quite a few did move to the interior, away from the evacuation zone instead of going to the camp which is a horrible thing. My wife's family went into Poston which was a horrible place, just out in the desert, no water, hot, dust, constant dust. She says that every day they had to sweep out about an inch of dust out of the, sand dust, inch of sand dust off the floor and off the bed because the bed was being very gritty because all this constant blowing. I'm quite sure it wasn't good for your health breathing that dust constantly, and hot. But I still cannot seem to understand why, but they all said they had no place to go. Well, it's true, they had no place to go. Many of the more aggressive Niseis did pick up and move, and a very large number moved to Ontario, Oregon, and started farming. They became very successful farmers, did very, very well.

JC: Do you think economic status or, is there some distinction that you can come up with why some people did move out and other people didn't and went to the camp? What might be that?

SN: Some part of it is economic. My very good friend who I met at the University of Utah, his name is Tets Okada, just picked up, decided to pick up and move. They were farmers in Salinas, California, where a very high level of anti-Japanese situations, and then moved to a hotel, you know, and moved there. I think it was because he didn't want to go to camp, my friend. And I guess they just packed up, and they had a brand new Buick, I think a brand new Buick or something and moved there and moved into this one room hotel. But I would say it was better than going to the camp. And then quite a large number did move there. Many of them were students who moved out. Students were allowed to come out and go to school in the, that area. We didn't know whether we were going to be, when the line, the demarcation would be moved eastward, but we took our chance and just went there.

JC: So when you lose the family business, that means literally you lose everything that was in it? What happened to those things? What happened to your family home?

SN: We had a salesman that helped us get rid of some of the goods. It was very interesting. He sold it to two or three stores in Seaside and another coastal town. And what they did was took all these merchandise which look, they look like European style merchandise and used their agate polishing machine and polished off the "made in Japan."

JC: That's amazing.

SN: And sold it all for a very good profit.

JC: So that's what happened to the goods and the merchandise. What about the family homes? You had a home in Mount Tabor.

SN: Oh, the home, we rented it. We rented it. I told my father, "Don't sell it. We don't need the money." Which is another thing, too, we were fairly well off. My father being in business and so on, we had... and then my father, my brother and I, three of us built chicken coops and we raised eggs, chickens and eggs.

JC: Where is this?

SN: In Salt Lake City. We went out in the country. It's not country now. It's all built up, but a small acreage, small acreage, and raised chickens and turkeys, and sold the eggs. When the chickens stopping laying, we took the chickens, chopped the head off and took them over to the restaurant, Coon Chicken Inn which is like Kentucky Chicken, but there was a... maybe it was before your time, I'm quite sure. Big black... you walk through his mouth. And every morning before I went to school, I helped my father take all these chickens that stopped laying, take them over there, and they dumped them in a great big kettle. You know, they stewed it all, and then they dried it out and deep fried it. If you boil the chicken long enough, they get tender like spring chicken.

JC: So here's a question. At the time that you... there was a Coon Chicken Inn in Portland at that time, I believe also...

SN: Yeah, yeah, up on Eighty-second.

JC: Did you think that that was prejudicial?

SN: That's on Sandy. I didn't think... no, no. In those days, people didn't think things like that were prejudicial. And also you got to remember there very few blacks in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City is a Mormon town, and the Mormon was highly prejudiced against... religious reasons, prejudice against blacks, anybody with dark skin.

JC: It seems ironic to be making chickens for the Coon Chicken Inn when you're a Japanese American who has been pushed off of the West Coast and has to go to Utah.

SN: [Laughs] That's right.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.