Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

<Begin Segment 7>

AC: So you graduated from high school by learning the Constitution, you graduated. And then war broke out. Do you remember where you were when the war began?

IK: Well, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on a Sunday, and so we heard it Sunday night, we were home, and then we couldn't believe it. But it was a shock to us, to my parents, too. You can just hear 'em, they just said, "Oh, my god." But then after that, there was a lot of stories going around that the farmers were growing their crops so the arrows would point to the airport, or they were radioing the submarines or something with their two-way radios and all that. So that's the reason they confiscated all our radios. We couldn't have shortwave on our radios. And we couldn't carry any, have any guns. And any Japanese literature was banned. There was a lot of things like that went on. So we had to burn all of our stuff, because they'd come in and inspect you if you didn't. So we did all of that. Let's see, that was in 1942 already, spring of '42. We heard stories like that, and then we start, they start talking in the papers about we'd have to go into camp and all that. We couldn't believe it, but then we got orders that you have two weeks to prepare. And they told us to make sure you have good shoes and all your personal belongings to take along with you. And so we had to crate everything up, what we wanted to take. Rest of it we had to sell or do something with it. So I don't know what happened to our household goods or furniture or anything, we just left it in the house.

AC: And someone else moved into the house?

IK: Oh, yes. We don't know who, because we went to camp, and after that we didn't know what went on behind us.

AC: What were you feeling when all this was going on?

IK: Well, I was a young kid yet, so it affected me to wonder what's going on. We're citizens, why should we go into camp? There was nothing we could do about it then. We tried to make do with what we had and get along.

AC: What was the feeling when this order came down saying that you've got two weeks to prepare? What were people thinking; what were people saying?

IK: Well, there wasn't much you could say, is there? You get an order to do something like that, you just try to carry it through the best you could. That's what we did, we said, "Well, shou ga nai." That's, "Can't help." Of course, I guess like the Isseis and Kibeis probably felt that, well, we started it, we have to pay for it. I don't know what they thought. It wasn't a good feeling, I'll say that much. And there were some Caucasians that felt sorry for us, too. Like you say, there was nothing you could do about it. An order is an order.

AC: Did you have to leave any treasured possessions behind that just disappeared?

IK: No. We didn't have any, like some people may have swords and things like that from, relics from Japan, but we didn't have anything like that.