Museum of Riverside

Lesson One Mits Inaba Oral History

Mitsuru “Mits” Inaba was a young boy when his father was arrested and his family was forced to evacuate to the Manzanar Relocation Center. They were later moved to an Immigration and Naturalization Services camp in Crystal City, Texas where they lived until 1946 when they returned to their family farm in Riverside.
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"It was a miserable place. The wind blew. And most people did something to their barracks to make it more hospitable, but if you didn't have some nail to pound nails and whatnot, you lived with what you could live with, which was a bare barrack with a door that didn't close very good. When the wind blew, the whole place was nothing but a dustbowl, and you lived within this dust storm all the time. "