“That’s true,” I said.

Of course, this was back in 1941, and an unscientific statement like that didn’t get questioned. Today we know that the Chinese don’t have any culture either. They went over to the Reds like the mass of ants that they are. It’s a natural life for them. Anyhow it doesn’t really matter, because we were bound to have trouble with them sooner or later anyhow. We’ll have to lick them someday like we licked the Japs. And when the time comes we’ll do it.

It wasn’t long after December 7 that the military authorities put up the notices on the telephone poles, telling Japs that they had to be out of California by such and such a date. In Seville—which is about forty miles south of San Francisco—we had a number of Japs doing business; one ran a flower nursery, another had a grocery store—the usual small-time businesses that they run, cutting pennies here and there, getting their ten kids to do all the work, and generally living on a bowl of rice a day. No white person can compete with them because they’re willing to work for nothing. Anyhow, now they had to get out whether they liked it or not. In my estimation it was for their own good anyhow, because a lot of us were stirred up about Japs sabotaging and spying. At Seville High a bunch of us chased a Jap kid and kicked him around a little, to show how we felt. His father was a dentist, as I recall.

The only Jap that I knew at all was a Jap who lived across the street from us, an insurance salesman. Like all of them, he had a big garden out on the sides and rear of his house, and in the evenings and on weekends he used to appear wearing khaki pants, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes, with an armload of garden hose and a sack of fertilizer, a rake and a shovel. He had a lot of Jap vegetables that I never recognized, some beans and squash and melons, plus the usual beets and carrots and pumpkins. I used to watch him scratching out the weeds around the pumpkins, and I’d always say: