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BN: So anyway, after a few months there, pretty much the whole camp goes to Amache.

MT: Amache.

BN: Do you remember your block or your address at Amache?

MT: Yeah, we were the only camp that didn't have numbers, we had letters. It went from 6-E, 7-E and then into 12-E, and then they went F, 6, 7 and up. We were in 9-E, 7-A and B. Barrack 7, Apartments A and B. The guy next door moved out after three or four months, two or three brothers moved out. And since my mother was not well, the block manager said, "Takano, take that one before somebody comes in." So we were able to have an extra room where Cookie and Teri stayed. We were lucky.

BN: And then where were the other people in the block from, mostly?

MT: We ended up again with the Colusa people. Colusa and there were some, a couple of Cortez people, Cortez was the next block, 10-E, and there were a whole bunch of, pretty much all Cortez. So we were Colusa, we had some Yuba City people, but that was about it. And then when then Alameda people came in, people from Topaz, they had relatives, and so they came. And from Tule Lake, they came into, Amache was the smallest camp. So we had more room than most, I guess, they sent them over. And they would come to our block. Alameda was some, they had some kind of thing that was pretty amazing that they would put Alameda people, say, in 6-G or somewhere, where they didn't know anyone. The Alameda people, they put 'em in, so we had a couple of Alameda people in our block.

BN: And then you were mentioning in the school, you were also... I mean, half the camp were kids from L.A.

MT: Yeah. We had, each grade had about... well, when you're in grammar school, we had sixth grade, I was in sixth grade. 6-1, 6-2, 6-3 and 6-4. And each class had about thirty people, thirty-five, thirty, thirty-five. And they were from A to L and L to N or whatever. So we were in the T to the Z, you know. And then they moved some S people in to even it up. But they had about thirty or thirty-five kids in each, and they did alphabetically. And so you just moved, went along. So you got to know your... we had L.A. people and Yuba City, everybody mixed up.

BN: Was there... I mean, did the L.A. city kids and the more country kids get along?

MT: No, they didn't. Again, then they'd go into some more discrimination. "You're from the inaka," they used to tell us. The L.A. kids, they were rough, tough guys. They had the Seinan gang, and I don't know how they... I guess when they moved the people, they moved a bunch of people and they were Seinan gang. And the Seinans, little kids with Seinan teachers, and old guys with Seinan t-shirts, you know. And they were bullies. They picked on a lot of the people. I remember his name was... he was the brother of a good friend of my classmate. He got beaten up every day. The police had to escort them from school when school was out, to home. And it got so they would get him after. So he finally, his brother, his older brother had moved to Chicago, I believe it was, he relocated after he got out of high school. So he went to join his brother, I felt so sorry for him. He was a nice guy, too.

BN: He got to leave camp.

MT: He got to leave camp, yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.