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TI: Well, we cleared the area for the house and the garage, and it took us about a year and a half to build, and we finally completed the house at the end of 1941. And as we were clearing the yard and getting ready to move in, our neighbor from across the road came over one Sunday afternoon and told us about December 7th. We were shocked. Any rate, we moved into our new home in January of 1942 and was only able to stay until May.

In March of 1942, I volunteered to join the United States Air Force, and the requirements at that time was that you had to have one year of college, and you had to pass a physical as well as a written examination. So I did, I passed both. And when it came to time of induction, I went down to the Portland airport with the rest of the group and was going to sign up. Well at that time, they told me that they weren't taking any inductees of Japanese ancestry. Well, I was quite shocked with that, so I went to our attorney in Hillsboro, attorney by the name of Paul Patterson. He was very prominent in politics in the State of Oregon, and he eventually became the governor of the state. He intervened on my behalf but to no avail, and I was classified 4-C as "enemy alien," and that's the way I remained the rest of the war. Meanwhile, we tried to move out of the West Coast area, and in order to do this, you had to obtain a travel permit. So I can remember going to the federal building in Portland nearly every day trying to make this arrangement. And what was required to obtain a permit was that you had to have a point of destination where you could go to and to live. Well, several families got together, and we were able to obtain a place in Vale, Oregon.

And so our permit finally came, and on May the 2nd, 1942, our family and the other families individually, we moved. I can remember we loaded up our car that we had. We loaded up a truck that we had. We had a ton and a half Chevrolet truck, and we moved out on May the 2nd. And because we were concerned that we may not be able to buy gasoline on the way, I loaded up 50-gallon drum of gasoline on the back of the truck. And instead of going on the main highway, Highway 30 as it was at that time, the same as 84 now, we went through Bend, through the back way, and we traveled at night. We finally arrived in Vale early the following morning, and then from there, we moved directly into Ontario; and here, there were seven of us, five boys, my parents, we had no place, no destination, no place to stay. We immediately looked around and found a vacant building just in the outskirts of Ontario on the road to Nyssa. This building was a former hatchery, and it was a single building, single room and just had a kitchen faucet. It had a concrete floor. So we moved into that building, partitioned the building for rooms and built an outhouse, and we stayed there and began working for a farmer just close by as common labor. This was in May, so we worked the rest of the year and learned how to grow onions and sugar beets. We harvested potatoes.

We looked around to start our farm for ourselves, and we found a farm to rent in an area called Oregon Slope, and there was an old house there that we moved into. We continued working, my father and the five of us boys, so we had quite a large crew. We wanted to start farming, but the problem was the non-availability of equipment. Everything was rationed, so I applied to get a tractor and was fortunate in getting a permit to buy a tractor. So we bought a John Deere and looked around and bought other equipment like disks, plows, harrows, seeders, and then had to learn how to irrigate because this was all irrigated farming. And of course farming here in the Willamette Valley, there is no irrigation. So this was a very new experience, and oftentimes, very trying. But nevertheless, we continued to work. We raised, our main crops were onions, potatoes, and sugar beets; but also we grew lettuce and celery and carrots, but eventually ended up with three main crops that are grown there. I was able to buy another tractor which was a Caterpillar D2, and we learned to operate that. We would work, do tractor work for other farmers; and with the five sons, we would take turns, and we would work 24 hours a day running that tractor.

Well, we farmed for two years. I was there until 1944, and I wanted to get back to college. And by that time, I had decided that I wanted to go into medicine. One of the reasons was that whether you're in military life or in civilian life, if you are in medicine, your occupation doesn't change. My younger brother, Yosh, decided that he wanted to be a pharmacist, so he left a year before me and went to University of Michigan. I visited him one time, and I thought well, "He's going to be there, I'll go to the University of Wisconsin." So I applied to Wisconsin and was accepted. It was very difficult to leave the farm in 1944 because in September, we had thirty acres of onions that was ready to be harvested. We had thirty acres of sugar beets that were to be harvested a little later, and we also had potatoes to harvest. And here, I had been fully responsible in overseeing the farm by that time, and so I was very undecided as to whether or not that I should leave at that time. But my parents talked me into leaving and going to school anyway, and I turned over the farm to my next brother, Ken.

Well, I can remember the trip to Madison, Wisconsin. I took the train from Ontario, and here it was in September. As soon as I got into Colorado, I got into a snowstorm that was quite a shock. But any rate, I finally got to Madison, Wisconsin. I didn't know where to stay. So there was a YMCA on the campus close to the campus, so I stayed there for the first week or two, enrolled in school. So looking around, I finally found a vacant fraternity house. It was named the Triangle which was an engineering fraternity house, and this house had been vacated because of the wartime conditions, and there were few students. So I was able to rent a room in this Triangle fraternity house and had a roommate, got a roommate who was a football player. This big strapping fellow was from Green Bay, Wisconsin. We got along very well. As a matter of fact, he had invited me to go home with him to Green Bay, and so I went up to see, meet his family.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.