I remember Hit Ohara sitting at my dad’s bowling-supply shop back in the early ’70s. My dad custom-d

I remember Hit Ohara sitting at my dad’s bowling-supply shop back in the early ’70s. My dad custom-drilled bowling balls and sold accessories like bags, shirts, and shoes. Hit would come by all the time, as would lots of other friends, to hang out and talk story. I had no idea about life in internment camps or WWII at the time. Hit was a teenager in Los Angeles and was playing sandlot football when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Being told they were being sent to an internment camp, he said they had about a month to pack..His family was lucky enough to store what they could not take at Nishi Hongwanji, the local Buddhist church. Being a teenager, he was thinking this was an “adventure” as they boarded a train on May 6, 1942 in Little Tokyo, which would eventually take him to Manzanar in Inyo County, California. “It was barren out there,” Hit recalls. With over 10,000 people and 504 barracks, it was about three to four families to a barrack, as lack of privacy and communal showers were the hardest on people. Hit made the best of it as one of his fondest memories with his friends was pushing up the barbed wire and crawling under the fence at night. Not to escape…but to go fishing!.They hiked up into the foothills, avoiding the searchlights, to the nearby streams. Once there, they used string, bent needles for hooks, and worms or insects as bait. Hit says he managed to catch a small fish and that it was like “something from heaven.”.Read more about Hitoshi “Hit” Ohara and the others in “The Go For Broke Spirit” now available at our website: http://www.thegoforbrokespirit.com  -- source link

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