<Begin Segment 5>

DH: Now during... when the order for evacuation came, you had Paul Ohtaki working for you, but he wasn't a reporter then. Can you tell me how Paul Ohtaki became a reporter for The Review?

WW: Yes.

DH: What was he doing first?

WW: Well, he was, he was our janitor. And... he would whistle... I've forgotten what he would whistle.

DH: And so you needed him to do some reporting for you, 'cause his family was being sent to Manzanar too.

WW: I beg your pardon?

DH: Paul was being sent to Manzanar, to the camp... Paul Ohtaki. He was the janitor...

WW: Well, when, when this thing was... when they were... oh, my.

DH: Take your time. I remember...

MW: You asked Paul to write, did you ask Paul to write... an article or letters from Manzanar?

WW: Yeah. They were evacuated... and... we wrote to Paul Ohtaki.

DH: And had him write you a letter back to The Review.

WW: Yeah.

DH: So, Paul's letters appear in The Review about once a week, what kind of... and it's information...

WW: Now wait, what?

DH: Paul Ohtaki's letters appear in The Review. That's how he became a...

WW: Ah, well...

DH: I remember you told him....

WW: He didn't... we contacted him and said we need... we don't want any fancy writing or... but we need to know what our neighbors are doing, wherever they are. And... I finally wrote to Paul and said, "You send us a letter once a week, telling what has happened to the group that's down there and if you don't do that, I'll break every bone in your body." [Laughs] So he got the message and he sent us until, I guess, they finally got him into the language school. The Japanese...

DH: Uh-huh. And so, I think he took... he took a job and left...

WW: I beg your pardon?

DH: He left... He got to leave the camp. And then, you had a couple of other people from camp, writing island news.

WW: Yes, yes. When Paul had to quit, or went off to do something, went to the language school... Sachicho, Sachiko? Nakata?

DH: Uh-huh.

WW: Yeah. Took over that job. And she did a dandy job.

DH: So every week The Review had the unique position of writing... keeping an article of what was going on in the camp, what kind of news... and the news was things like weddings and...

WW: That's right. Nothing exciting, just what was going on.

DH: Uh-huh, baseball scores...

WW: That's right.

DH: ...graduations...

WW: You betcha. You betcha.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.