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HH: And how old were you when the war broke out?

NH: 1941, so that would be fifteen, sixteen.

HH: You were about...

NH: About the sophomore year in high school, tenth grade.

HH: Do you remember much about what it was like to move out of your home in San Francisco?

NH: Well, you mean... when the war broke out, we couldn't believe it was true and we didn't know what the consequences was when this happened. But it came to my mind that when the curfew started, we were really kind of being imprisoned in our house, and we couldn't go out freely. And I guess I didn't really feel the full impact at that time, I was too young to realize what was happening. But it was a Sunday morning, I could remember, and we just came back from church. And we were eating lunch, and this news came over the radio at that time. And after that, everybody was wondering what was going to happen.

And we heard the federal authorities were going around rounding up people, and I think it was our neighbor, Mr. Enomoto, was picked up and sent to, or interned in one of the camps in Dakota, I think it was, Bismarck. And I remember you had to, we got the order for evacuation, so we had to get rid of all our property. And I remember we had a brand-new Pontiac, and I think the full price at that time in 1941 was about six or eight hundred dollars for that car, but we had to get rid of it for about three hundred. So that hurt my father's feeling about that. And we had to... oh, his print shop was sealed by the FBI for I don't know what reason, but it was sealed, we couldn't get in there, and we couldn't settle the property there, until later on, we were able to get in. And we took one press that he wanted to keep, so we stored it at Gyosei Gakuen, which is a Japanese Catholic church school. And the other things were sold, probably at real rock-bottom price. And our household goods, I guess we sold most of it. We stored some of it with friends, but later on, we couldn't locate them. We did find a few rugs that we had that were retrievable, but the other things, they just disappeared as far as I know.

HH: All right. As far as the evacuation is concerned, where did you go to in San Francisco?

NH: Well, we had relatives in Watsonville, California, near Salinas. And to keep the family unit together, we got permission from the authorities to move down to Watsonville. And we moved down there, and after we settled our property there, we moved down to Watsonville and we evacuated with the Toda family, that's our relatives.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.