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HH: What happened to you and your family with the series of events that took place from that point on until you reached Philadelphia?

AI: Well, Pearl Harbor occurred December 7, 1941. I was at church. I had just come out of church, here I am, I guess, 1941 I was seven years old. I'm waiting in our 1941 Buick, waiting in front of the church. My mother's in the car and we're listening to the radio, and we hear this bombing. And to me at the time, didn't strike me as anything significant. But when they announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor and it came over the radio, my mother screamed. And she jumped right out of the car, she ran into the church, I could still see her running into the church, Salinas church, I forget whether it's Presbyterian or Baptist. I think it was Methodist, I'm sorry. And all the people came running out of the church, and I could just see the hysteria. And then when my father got in the car, my grandfather got in the car, we drove home and we turned on the radio and pulled down all the shades. As a seven year old, I felt this traumatic experience just by sensing the urgency from my parents.

HH: And you had to move.

AI: Okay, oh, you wanted to go into the... okay. So at that time, my father was given two weeks to sell his farm.

HH: Two weeks?

AI: Yeah. My father was given two weeks, so in that two weeks' time, he sold his farm, but he didn't have time to sell the other farms. And those were the lucky people. Fortunately, my father was able to sell his farm, which was dirt cheap. But he had just bought a 1941 Buick that summer, and he was offered five hundred dollars for this two thousand dollar Buick. So he said no way, he said he's going to get rid of the Buick, and he was too proud of the Buick. So he took the Buick and took it to my grandmother's farm and put it in a garage at my grandmother's farm. And my grandmother didn't have to sell her property because a Filipino worker said he would take care of the farm. So she didn't have to sell her farm, and so she was one of the lucky ones, too. And then I remember the big bonfire out front because my father was a kendo person and he had all these masks and all these shields. I remember that going into the fire, and all the pictures, anything related to Japan that my grandfather had, it all went up in flames. And then I just remember going into assembly center, Salinas Assembly Center, and carrying these suitcases, your steel suitcases, I could still, brown steel suitcases, I felt like my arms would fall off. And we walked into the Salinas Assembly Center, and we got all these vaccination shots and I remember those shots, and oh man, my arms really hurt. Then I became a kind of a brat at that time because being a farm kid, being kind of isolated from the rest of the world, and then in with a bunch of kids your own age, and there's a lot of peer pressure and so forth. So I think I became a real difficult kid, because any time they had those curfew, sirens would go off, I'd be at the other end of the camp, and I couldn't run home, so I used to hide under the barracks. And then these officers kind of picked me up and take me home, and then I'd get the licking of my life once I got home. What really struck me then was when I looked through the barbed wire fences, and I still remember the guards looking down at me with a rifle. But when I looked through the barbed wire fence, I could see our farm. My grandmother's farm was over there on my right, and the farm that I used to walk to kindergarten was right in front of me. And as a kid I used to say, "Gee whiz, what am I doing behind these barbed wire? There's my home right there." So it really struck me funny, and I remember that to this day. I don't know how far you want me to go.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.