Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Elaine Ishikawa Hayes Interview I
Narrator: Elaine Ishikawa Hayes
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 12 & 13, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-helaine-01-0027

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AI: Let me, let me take you back, then. What... we're, we're still in, about in May of 1942, and you had been describing the scene at the Sacramento auditorium and how people were standing in lines and waiting with the luggage. The army buses came up, and then you got on. And tell me what happened once you were on the bus.

EH: Well, Walerga was maybe thirty miles outside of Sacramento, if that much. Now it's all filled. I mean, it's all urbanized. But boy, when I was within sight of that camp, I was kind of sitting toward the front of the bus and I saw that ahead of me, the black barracks way out there in the... even, it was pretty warm, and, and I thought kind of shocked. I thought, "They can't do that to us." Because I knew this must have been where we were headed. And of course, once you get off the bus and into that kind of situation, it's such a turmoil, rush, and, and hot and all this luggage and you don't know where -- I wonder how we're going to find the place we're supposed to go to. And sure enough, there are tables out there, and, and people look for your name, and then they tell us where to go, which way to go, and, and things were in numerical order so you could find it, but then... and they'll say, "A truck will bring your things by." But, so you're walking over there. Nobody's escorting you, and you come across this scene, and it just stuns you, "You mean, this is where we're going to stay? This is where we're going to sleep?" It's dirty and dusty and there's nothing of anything to help you clean the place up. I think eventually somebody brought a broom for us, because for one thing, I think the room is just about this size, twenty by twenty-five. And I think in that place I don't know that we even had a potbelly stove.

One of the crises in Walerga... we didn't have plumbing. There were outhouses in a row. I think the blocks maybe were almost the same formation as the Tule Lake blocks, and I can't even remember who, who lived in the other rooms, but one, one day, in hot Sacramento, and waiting for meals in Sacramento, Walerga, was terrible. It was so hot. Nobody thought to bring umbrellas, but you needed them for... it was dangerous, because some of the old people and for children it was very tiring. We had to carry our own eating utensils, and it just seemed like we were always forever waiting in line. Breakfast, noon, and, and lunches, it seemed like that's about all we did, though those of us in college-age range and the cluster of friends that we had, we... on Sunday afternoons we would find an empty barrack where it was cool and shaded, and there were areas where there was something like scrub oak, scrub oak, and we found a corner of the camp where the last barrack had scrub oak at the end.

And, and at one time they had asked us to set up a filing system. I, I think they were asking us to make an alphabetical order of everybody in camp, and Tule Lake was maybe... Tule Lake was 10,000 and Walerga must have been, I don't know, maybe half that. No, not even half that. Maybe two or three thousand, because people like Marysville, which is another county over and other... they had their own assembly centers. But I remember starting a filing system, but I, I don't think we ever finished it.

I had a friend who, who was a classmate whose Issei mother with five sons I think, and the father died suddenly, being crushed by... he was fixing a car and the lifts -- what do you call them, that hold the car up -- slipped, and the car fell on him and he died leaving the five sons. I think the oldest was maybe eight, the youngest was, had... the two youngest were twins. Anyway, Janus Kurahara comes out... one of the older sons comes out with a book called Gambatte, and it was a very good, social, economic social picture of Sacramento's Nihonmachi. They were, they were from Marysville, which is about forty-five miles north of Sacramento initially. That's where the accident happened. And she was from... mother was from a fairly good family, and there were Isseis who wanted to... there were people who want, men who wanted to marry her, but everybody wanted her to send her children back to Japan and she wouldn't do that. So finally there, there was a Filipino barber who they knew who married her and in very modest, modest terms helped raise the family. But the... let's see, the third son in that family was in my class, and... all the way through elementary and junior high and high school. And what happened was the mother got sick and she was hospitalized during evacuation, so the boys had to come into camp by themselves, and they did-, and when the mother... they knew she was not going to survive, they didn't let the kids go to the hospital. They didn't... my impression was that they didn't. And I was particularly aware of Roy, and I thought that Roy wasn't informed, or by the time he was informed it was too late. And I think, I think Janus puts it in terms that I think he went and, and none of the other sons were allowed to go. But that kind of, that kind of situation is very sad. I found out later that a friend of mine, his mother was very sick, and she was hospitalized, and I think later brought her to, they brought her, I forgot, to assembly or to Tule Lake. But anyway --

AI: So --

EH: That kind of situation is...

AI: There were examples of families being separated and --

EH: (Yes), (yes).

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.