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AI: And then in 1945 then, there was, of course, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ending of the war. And I'm wondering, what did you hear about that, or how did you find out?

AS: Well, I don't know how my father found out about it, but he, because he was, he was reporting news in camp.

AI: He was?

AS: Yeah.

AI: Oh, tell me about that.

AS: I think somebody, I think one of his friends had a short-wave radio or whatever and, although we weren't supposed to have a radio, he might've made one or whatever. And so he found out about it through that. But then he, we didn't discuss too much about it because he just told us the war ended.

AI: And so, your father did believe the news that, that Japan had lost the war?

AS: Oh yeah. Yeah, that's why he, like after the war ended, people wanted to go back to Japan because they didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. And my father tried to tell 'em that, "Don't go back," but a lot of 'em didn't listen.

AI: So your father really did not want to go to Japan.

AS: No. He didn't want to go back.

AI: He didn't think --

AS: He wanted to go back to Peru.

AI: So then, after the ending of the war --

AS: Oh, one more thing is we had a swimming pool in camp. And the swimming pool was divided in half, or, it was a round swimming pool and divided in half where they had a fence, actually, posts dividing the two sides. And the one side was really shallow and then the other side went deep suddenly into deep, it became deep. And then, so we used to go swimming right after softball practice and this one day we either had a meeting or whatever, and so we couldn't, we couldn't go. And that's, that's the day that two kids were drowned in camp.

AI: Oh, how awful.

AS: Yeah. Yeah, and I don't know, they were supposed to have lifeguard there but I don't know what happened to the lifeguards. They were supposed to have two guys there. None of 'em were there. And, you know, if we were there, we might've saved 'em.

AI: That's terrible. Well, it sounds like there were many activities going on at camp.

AS: Uh-huh.

AI: That, and for a family like yours, that everyone was, had activities to do.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.