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LT: Okay. Well, let's talk about the war. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Where were you and what happened, and what did you think?

DS: I think that I was in a movie theater. Maybe we remember that the intercom, I mean, came out and said all the servicemen were to report to the base right away, but they didn't say why. And until I came home, I didn't know what had happened. And I think it was through the radio that we found out what happened. I'm pretty sure it was the radio or somebody came over and told us that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and war was being declared. Then I thought, oh, that's why they told us at the movie theater, announced for the servicemen to report to their bases. I didn't know until I came home, and I thought, "Oh, wow, what's happening?" Yeah, soon after that, we were told, they imposed a curfew on us, we had to be in by, I can't remember what time. And my brother would invite guys over to play poker, and I remember his putting blankets over the basement windows so they couldn't see. And the Chinese people, they had buttons saying, "I am Chinese," so they wouldn't be taken as Japanese. So that was quite a jolt to hear that war was being declared, and what happened afterwards, that we had to evacuate.

That was an awful period of time, and actually, worse was when we had to leave and go into camp. But we were herded like sheep, and we never, I mean, we never questioned, where, I mean, today there would be riots protesting what the government tells us to do. But in 1941, no one did that, and I think actually the JACL was a very young organization, that they didn't have too much power behind them, and they couldn't fight... actually, you can't fight the government, and what happened was they told us we had to evacuate, and gave us time, and that's what happened. It was sad, but like I say, we didn't protest. They gave us time to... we were lucky, and we had friends who took care of our house for us, and they rented it during the war to soldiers and their wives, or their family, and so my mother, they would come back to the house after the camps were closed and she was in Chicago. She and my brother came back, and the house was still there, unoccupied, so they took up life. But it was really a sad, sad period of time there, what happened.

LT: When you learned that you would be leaving, that you would be forced to leave your home and leave Seattle, can you talk about your thoughts and then what you needed to do to prepare to leave?

DS: It was, like I say, a very bad time. We were told to leave, and we were told that we were to leave on such and such a date. We were to take only two suitcases. Of course, at that time, we didn't have anything, but today, that wouldn't even fill my shoes. But we just went along with what they told us to do. We did not protest. Like I say, we had these friends, my sister, older sister's friends, who said they would take care of our house, and that's the only thing we had was the house. We had good neighbors who said they'd watch the house. Other than that, we did what we were told.

LT: What do you remember about... you have one suitcase. What do you remember about the choices of what you were going to take and how you left the house?

DS: We left the house intact. Everything was in the house, we didn't take anything out of the house. And what we packed for ourselves was just clothes, shoes, and that's all we took was clothes. And of course, like I say, in 1941, we didn't own too much anyway, I mean, compared to what we are now. So two suitcases, each of us took two suitcases and we boarded a bus and went to Puyallup. And the house, we left it intact. All the furniture was in there, everything was in there. And then we didn't have to worry about, "What should we do with this," "what should we do with that." The Olsons were to take care of our house. They said, "Just leave everything." And so they rented it furnished like that. Well, when my mother came home, the stuff was still in the house. Of course, they had to dispose of a lot of stuff years later, but we never had a problem of what to do with this and what to do with that, 'cause we didn't have much. We didn't have anything except the house and furnishings in the house. So to us, it was not a problem like people who were on the farm had to dispose of the farm and the tractors.

LT: Your sister was not with your family.

DS: My oldest sister had gone on a tour of Japan. I think the war broke out in '41, she probably went in 1940. She's a Catholic, but she went with a Christian group. And this is what they did. They had, they called them kengakudan, and someone would lead a group. She went with, oh, maybe fifteen other young ladies of her age and chaperones. Of course, yeah, they boarded a ship, and so she was stranded in Japan when the war broke out. She was a Catholic and she was with Our Mothers of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo. And she went, I think she went to school there, or she taught at the Sacred Heart Academy in Tokyo. And then she was to come back on the first ship that was after the war started, she was to come back on a ship, and the mothers told her not to get on that ship because it would turn back, which it did. So then she was stranded on Japan during the war, so she was associated with the Sacred Heart school there, taught school there, and later went to work for General McArthur's forces in Tokyo, in the office. And then she was one of the first Nisei to come back to the United States, and the first ship that came back. And after she came back, she got a scholarship to Seattle University, she graduated there, and she started to work at the Seattle University and went to get her master's at Columbia, and then came back to work at Ingraham High in Seattle as a counselor. So she was the only one of us that went to college. All of us never did, and she just worked herself back in life in Seattle. Took care of my mother, she lived with my mother, took care of her, and she was happy to be back in the United States.

LT: So she was separated from your family when you went to the assembly center.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.