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Visit to Amache

In mid-September 1942, after our first harvest was virtually done and before my freshman classes were to begin, I took my mother to visit my sister Helen and her family (Mrs. T. lino, her mother-in-law, Ken lino, her husband, and Glen lino, her son) at the Amache Relocation Camp. We had last seen them in Los Angeles some seven months earlier—seven months seemed like eternity considering all the trials and tribulations that occurred in the interim. Amache, Colorado was 270 miles from our farm, but it took mother and I seventeen hours to ...

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Starting a New Farm

Starting a farm operation from scratch in the San Luis Valley is a very difficult task at best. The growing season is short and the crops require extra personal care. Add to this, the time is the middle of February 1942 and all of the established farms are already rented out by this time. Certain vegetables need to be started from seed in hot beds in Mid-March. New equipment and tools need to be purchased in order to prepare the soil for planting. Despite the shortage of time, the difficult and arduous obstacles ...

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The Volunteer Migration

Around January 14, 1942, a Presidential Proclamation required all Japanese aliens to register and forever carry with them papers that identified them as "enemy aliens." By the end of January 1942, General John De Witt of the 6th Army Area Defense declared all Japanese aliens and their families be rounded up from the "sensitive areas" and incarcerated. The designated "sensitive areas" included San Pedro, San Diego, Long Beach, etc., mostly all sea ports and harbors. The public sentiment and hysteria were creating a lot of tension and uncertainty.

The family decided that the sooner ...

Friends and family have asked me to chronicle my life experiences during World War II. Since I was　barely thirteen when Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was attacked by the Japanese, my remembrances and interactions are limited to an early-teenaged Japanese American growing up in a chaotic, prejudiced, "Japan-hating" society.

However, family and friends who shared these experiences with me are rapidly diminishing. For example, one of the more memorable experiences was my family's volunteer evacuation from California to Colorado which was implemented in two segments. The first segment of the notorious "caravan of Japs" consisted of six people and three ...