Excluded

My name is James Arwol (?) TsuTsui. My parents were immigrants from Japan and they decided to settle in the Los Angeles area in the early 1900's. They raised a family of 7 children. We were all born in Los Angeles and we all attended school in Los Angeles. On December 7, 1941, I was a 16 year-old high school student. I was working on the weekends in a produce market that was part of a supermarket in Long Beach. That fateful morning found me working on a fruit display in the produce section. A couple walked up to me and the gentleman, with an odd look on his face, said I hear you guys were bombing at Pearl Harbor I looked at him and I said No, I wasn't bombing; I don't even know where Pearl Harbor is! And his wife said Come on, hun, let's get out of here and they walked away. I was mulling in my mind what he had said and I was trying to place where Pearl Harbor was. Just about then one of the butchers was listening to the news on the radio turned the volume up real high and we heard the news Japs bombing Pearl Harbor and attacking Hawaii. When the impact of the news hit me, I sat on the floor and covered my face with my hands and I wondered What's ever gonna become of us? It wasn't too long before we found out. In February of 1942, an executive order was issued by President Roosevelt, the order said that all persons of Japanese ancestry were to be excluded from the West Coast and that included American citizens as I was. In April we were given two weeks' notice to get ready to leave our homes. My father was at a gas station and he was leave the inventory of the station and all his equipment and tools were left in the care of a neighbor. As I remember, his name was Vasquez. Well, that was the last time we ever saw Mr. Vasquez. On the day of departing our homes, we gathered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church where I went to Sunday school. We gathered at St. Mary's in a motorcade. The motorcade was about 2 blocks long and we were escorted by military police through the streets of Los Angeles to Arcadia where the Santa Anita racetrack is located. On the way to Santa Anita we would see groups of people jeering at us as we drove by. We drove through a large barb wire gate at Santa Anita and we saw row upon row of barracks which turned out to be our homes. We were there until later end of year that we were shipped to more permanent quarters or what was called relocation centers.