<Begin Segment 30>
TI: Today is Wednesday, July 26th, and we're starting the second day of interviews with Henry. And yesterday, we, we talked about your, sort of your early childhood life, a little bit about your family, and then we had just gotten into the, the wartime era. And where we left off was you had gotten us to, to Hastings Park, Vancouver.
HS: Yes.
TI: And you had just described the, sort of some of the...
HS: The setup.
TI: The sleeping conditions, where they slept.
HS: Yeah, sleeping conditions, that's right.
TI: But, so let's pick it up from there, and maybe, as a first question, I'm thinking, you had been in Prince Rupert, and there had, there had been a sizeable Japanese community.
HS: Oh, yes.
TI: But now, down at Hastings Park, where there were Japanese from Vancouver and Salt Spring...
HS: And from all, yeah, from all the different areas outside of Vancouver. Vancouver people, the people that were living in Vancouver, the Japanese Canadians there, were left alone, until they were given the notice that they had to get out of the city and go such... so they just stayed at their present abode. But anybody, the people, Japanese Canadians that were outside Vancouver and the lower mainland, people that they couldn't contact easily, were brought into Hastings Park so they could, in a way, it was a way to get control of the situation. As I had mentioned before, a lot of this was being done ad hoc. Everything was being, they were learning as they, the Mounties were learning what to do as they went along.
TI: And approximately how many people were, were in Hastings Park?
HS: Well, at one, at one time, there would be, there could be as many as two or three thousand people in there, in Hastings Park. But there was a limit to how many you could put in there, but Vancouver had the largest population, and there was, total numbers of all, if you take everybody on the West Coast in 1942, approximately 22,000.
TI: Okay, for the whole thing.
<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.