by Roy Iwata
“My father had to sell his Chevrolet for $200 (he had just bought it a few months earlier for $800).”
I was 12 years old and attending Lincoln Junior High School in Sacramento when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. My family—my parents, two older brothers, grandmother, aunt and uncle—ran a parking garage and corner store on the site of an old dairy.
When the removal orders came in May 1942, we had to sell everything. My father had to sell his Chevrolet for $200 (he had just bought it a few months earlier for $800). The first electric refrigerator he had bought a year earlier for the store went for $35.
On May 13, we took a Yellow Cab taxi to the Memorial Auditorium at 16th and J, where we would be loaded onto buses which would take us to Walerga Assembly Center, 16 miles north of Sacramento. Not many people came to see us leave, not even my classmates or teachers.
About the contributor: Roy Taichi Iwata was 12 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Roy’s family was sent to Walerga Assembly Center in Sacramento; then Tule Lake, CA; and finally, Topaz, UT in 1943. After the War, the Iwatas returned to Sacramento. Roy finished high school and joined the Army. While stationed in Japan, he married. The Iwatas settled in Sacramento and raised four children, celebrating almost 60 years of marriage. His memoir was shared with us by his daughter, Nancy Roskoff.
Copyright 2011, Roy Iwata. All rights reserved.