“You know, before we left, we were like little kids. When you go into camp, you got to grow up. You're aware of other things besides yourself. And you're nobody.”

“I remember my mother and I visited the bathroom building and she had fainted. Nothing like that ever happened before so I thought she had died. That was so traumatic, other ladies went to her aide and others tried to console me.”

A lot of people, like I said, didn’t even know we were in a camp. They see my picture and say, “What’s that?” Well, it’s my card from when I was in a concentration camp. “What concentration camp?”

“The coyotes would come down from the mountains. At night you could hear them thundering and howling and so that was a very frightening time because the camp was emptying and that was happening.”

“After getting used to things, we were able to make friends. See, as people coming from the farm, we weren't able to play with other kids and it brought a lot of new friends.”

“He had seen me entertain pre-war days at the Nisei Week talent show. He heard me singing, and I was 14, and he says he was smitten. He says, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’

“We had our Christmas tree and my dad said we would take the last family picture before he had to turn in all the cameras, swords and everything into the police station.”

“Army trucks would pull up and someone would shout down, ‘How many in your family?’ And they would throw the toilet paper, and you had to go pick it up. And that lack of human dignity, it just went on and on.”

“My dad used to fish. But we didn’t have any equipment so he caught fish with his hands. He would walk along the stream and he would stick his hand in. He found out if you cradled them and gently took them out of the water, they wouldn’t move.”

“They didn’t break down or anything. Very, very strong people. Actually all the Issei are all like that because when they came over from the old country, they came with nothing. They worked hard all their life for their family. But when you become a parent, you start to see, feel all these things they went through.” 

“If it didn’t happen, if we weren’t evacuated, I wouldn’t have never met Art. From Peru, to a little farm girl in Oregon, how would we meet, you know? So I have no regrets.”

“When I think about it, I’m mad at Japan for creating this problem. Because the yes-yes, no-no question came up because of the war. It would never have come up before if things were okay. And I’m angry at them because they knew that they had family and relatives living in the United States.”

“When we had to relocate we had to go to Pinedale Assembly Center. One thing that kind of touched my heart is when we left Auburn, we boarded a train. And my teacher brought the class to send me off. So, that was really nice.”