Stories by author "Jimmy Doi": 19
Stories
Defense Plant
"So I went and started working for this defense plant, and I worked there for about three months...It used to be a bicycle shop and they made it into a defense plant...
I don’t know what the radar parts were that they were making, and that’s…
Early Release
"Well, [Eleanor Roosevelt] came to the camp, and after that people started going out to work outside the camp. Until then, no one could go out...
I went and I was working in a grocery store [in Cleveland]...When I got my order to go into the…
Life in the Camp
"There were 10,000 in our camp...as a whole, it was one mile each, you know, all the way. We were on one side of the camp and then there was the side for baseball fields. At first, kids used to go underneath the fence and clean up the field with…
Tulare Assembly Center
"They told us to go to the railroad station with one suitcase each and we waited for the train and the train came and there were a lot of people there from Los Angeles...We had to keep all the blinds down. But the train operator was mad at the…
Gila River Internment Camp
"I volunteered to go to the next camp...I was living with my brother. My brother decided to volunteer with me! He left his family and we went just the two of us...I didn’t know where it was and when we left, we thought we were going to go to a…
Forced Internment
"We lived in town and they had telephone poles all around in the town, you know, and they said we had to evacuate in a couple of weeks. So my brother, he tried to go to his farm but there was a guard there - an Army guard - and he wouldn’t let…
The Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor
"We were in Sunday school class and someone came in and said someone attacked Pearl Harbor and I thought, I don’t know Pearl Harbor. It was a Caucasian Sunday school teacher and we were supposed to go to have a basketball outing, you know, and…
A Long Journey
"[My parents] had friends in California that they knew there. So that’s the only place…all they knew was Oxnard, California. And from El Paso they went all the way to Los Angeles to Oxnard. Walked all the way...My dad went to work for...the…
The Marriage of Jimmy Doi's Parents
"My parents, well, they were from Hiroshima, Japan, and they eloped. The day that my mother was supposed to get married to someone else, my [mother's] sister took my father to a woodshed and had all my mother’s Japanese clothes, you know.…