<Begin Segment 3>

HH: How old were you when the war broke out?

WW: Well, I was twenty, I think, born in 1921, yes, twenty years old.

HH: And what were you doing at that time? I mean, not specifically that day, but...

WW: Oh, what was I doing then? Well, I was going to the University of California at Berkeley, I was commuting back and forth from San Francisco to Berkeley. And I had started Cal in 1939, I believe, so I had... I was just finishing my second year.

HH: I see. So when the war broke out, then it became... I guess it fell upon you to close up the household?

WW: No, it fell upon my older sister.

HH: I see.

WW: She had already graduated, just barely had graduated from Cal, and therefore she had a degree, and she wanted very much to find a job at that time so that she could support us since my father wasn't there. But we soon found out that that was impossible for anybody of Japanese ancestry. So she took care of closing up the office and getting rid of things while I went back and forth, and thankfully was able to finish off, essentially, that particular year of college. And I think most of our, the cleaning up of the house and selling the things and so on was done by her... my younger sister was much too young at that time.

HH: Typically, the FBI came right in and stood guard of all the materials in the office. Was that true in your case?

WW: I believe they closed it up and sealed it. And then they may very well have searched it, I don't know. But there came a time when they released the contents, and at that time, then the [inaudible] went down and went through the motions necessary to dispose of everything. There was, for example, something he called a commercial museum. This was a display of Japanese products. I don't know whatever happened to all those things, but I believe she got some merchants to come in and bid on the items and bought and took things away. But like everybody else, the losses were almost total. Recovered essentially nothing.

HH: I assume then, after you closed up your home in San Francisco, you and your sister, that you went into Tanforan.

WW: Yes. The next step was, essentially, the evacuation process, when we were told to report at a certain street corner on a certain date at a certain time with a bag or whatever, and this we did. We arrived at Tanforan, which was a racetrack within San Francisco, and remained there for... let's see. We were taken from our homes to Tanforan, I think it was, must have been about March of 1942, and I believe we left Tanforan, September, sometime later that year, for Topaz, which was a relocation center in the middle of the state of Utah, south of a town called Deseret, which is the heart of Mormon country, I guess the heart of sugar beet country. And we found ourselves in this absolute wasteland, barracks, barbed wire, watchtowers, everything, the whole works.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.