02/25/1943

Dear Diary,
Terminal Island was being shut down and everyone had to move out. We were given 48 hours to pack all of our things. Mama left most of her things in Ocean Park, yet she brought her pottery, heirlooms, tea sets, silver, and one fine old set of china, blue and white porcelain. On the day we left Woody’s car was so packed with boxes that you couldn’t see out the back! Mama had a guy stop buy to look at her china set. He offered her fifteen dollars and Mama stared to quiver. She wanted two hundred but the man said he could on pay seventeen fifty at the most. So Mama reached into the case and picked up a nice shiny dinner plate, then hurled it at the ground shattering it into hundreds of pieces, proving her point. There was a lot of talk about internment or something like that for all the Japanese Americans.  We took the train into the camp. I was pretty excited, but what kid wouldn’t be. The shades were down almost the entire time until one was opened and then I saw. We were in the middle of nowhere, or somewhere in a desert. We rode past the fence into the camp. Welcome to Manzanar. -214 words

02/13/1943

Dear Diary,
Papa's been gone for about a month now. Turns out he was taken to an interrogation center because the Americans thought that he delivered oil to the Japanese submarines offshore. I didn't cry when papa was taken away, but Mama just would not stop crying. She weaped for days at the thought of papa being gone for so long. I knew this was the beginning of what was about to be a frantic time in my family's life. The move began as we started packing up everything we could take with us. Mama's biggest fret was now keeping the family together. We moved to Terminal Island with a whole bunch of other Japanese Americans. I had never lived among or gone to school with other Japanese before and I was terrified all the time. -136 words

01/05/1943

Dear Diary,

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was all kind of a daze for me. I didn't really understand what was going on. The night of the bombing papa burned the flag he got from Hiroshima. He also burned a bunch of papers, documents, and anything that might lead anyone to think he still had connections with Japan. I still remember that the morning after the bombing two men came and knocked on Woody's door. They walked in and before you know it they were gone, only with papa between them this time. Papa didn't struggle at all, he just walked on out. "He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy". -117 words

12/07/1942

Dear Diary,
It was the first weekend in December and all I could see was boats beyond boats headed out to sea. I just turned seven, I can remember because it was a Sunday and I was out of school. So I went down to the wharf to watch as one by one the boats sailed away. My papa was on one of those boats giving orders, he just loved to give orders! He attend military camp when he was just seventeen. My two older brothers Billy and Woody were his crew. They checked the nets, fuel tanks, and ran to the grocery store to get more cigarettes. Papa's boat was called The Nereid,long and white. He also had another boat called The Waka. Finally they were off, sailing into the horizon when we noticed that they weren't disappearing anymore. They were actually getting bigger, they were on they way back to the dock! We couldn't believe it! The Japanese had just bombed pearl harbor. -164 words