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LG: And both of your parents in your family was incarcerated, right?

AN: Well, okay, getting to that, by chance, my father was a professionally trained chef and working as such, was badgered, I guess, is the right word for it in English by my mother's brother or my uncle Chester, who was living with us in the same apartment in San Francisco. And he had, so they had a cousin living in Hollister who was into farming. And my uncle Chester wanted to get into farming, commercial farming. And so, but since he was not twenty-one, he couldn't get a bank loan for supplies and equipment and things like that. So he needed somebody who would sign bank loans, and that was my father, because my mother was still also not old enough. Anyway, after several months of badgering, he acquiesced and agreed to try farming for a few years in Hollister. So they agreed to move from San Fran to Hollister in something like August of that year, in 1941. But a few weeks later, Pearl Harbor gets bombed. The landlord, an Italian farmer who owned several different farms in Hollister, told my father and mother to not invest a lot of money in seeds or supplies or anything, "Because we don't know what's going to happen to you guys." Well, he had some kind of a special insight, but eight, nine weeks later, in February of 1942, executive order gets signed, orders going out to the Japanese American community being incarcerated. So that altered the course of our family, and my mother and father were given notices and there were published posters and all this kind of thing telling people where to show up, by when, and so on. And so we had to follow orders, otherwise the FBI would come after us, and they did later on with people who were not, quote, "complying" with federal orders. So we went to Salinas, which is not far from Hollister, and they had a temporary detention center set up in horse stalls. So we got there in end of February or March, and we sat in our, lived inside of these, stunk like hell. I remember a smell like that, indelible, and we stood there, we were there for, until, I think, May or June.

During that time, the government was building these camps, and these were technically called WRA camps, War Relocation Authority camps, which is different from internment camps. "Internment" had a Geneva Convention legal definition that the U.S. had signed into, which was after World War I, and that allowed signatory countries to detain foreign individuals, mostly non-citizens in camps, internment camps, for security reasons. And in that category, some three to five thousand Japanese immigrants were jailed in Crystal City, Texas, which was a main detention center for internment, along with five, six thousand Italian Americans, or Italians who were mostly immigrants, and roughly a comparable number of Germans, and they were rounded up from various parts of the United States and brought to Crystal City, Texas. So that was the internment facility.

Well, the government, U.S. government was into all kinds of euphemisms, and they used the term "internment" for those of us who were incarcerated in WRA camps, because the general public didn't know what the difference was. Even didn't know what "internment" was. So this is how they got away with that. And also, instead of incarcerating citizens, we were classified as "non-aliens," another euphemism from the federal government. But I was a non-alien for several years, not an American citizen, which is ridiculous, but it's what they did.

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