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TI: Good. So let's talk about daily living for, like, your parents. In Hastings Park, oftentimes you were at school. What would your mother and father do?

HS: My mother and father, they, they worked in, in and around the camp at times. They would do, she did a lot of, they worked in the kitchen, they did -- lot of these, the parents, didn't do, and other ones were looking after kids. They had, mind you, my mother had to look after kids, 'cause she had two smaller siblings. So she had to, she didn't do very much of that work in terms of what you call employment-type work in the camp. My father did have to work, he, he was in the camp, they were building, they were building little cabinets, they were building anything that they could do to keep them occupied. They were doing that, some of them worked as sort of, they worked as substitute guards or people that went around picking up, cleaning, keeping the place clean, doing all kinds of little odd jobs around, around the Hastings Park. Although there was a fence around it, and you had -- so you could go out, and you were allowed to go out, and I can't remember how, how often you could leave the camp, but there wasn't a strict sort of situation where you could never go out. All kinds of people always going out, visiting Vancouver, coming back, but they had to register to go out, and you had to sort of check in. So the other thing was that I can't remember whether it was, there was a quota as to how many can go out or how often you can go out, but we were out, certainly Harry and I would go out quite often, we would go out.

TI: So what would you and Harry do when you went out?

HS: Well, we were, we would go out and go down to see his sister who was living in Vancouver, one of the places we'd go. The other thing we would do is just, we would just go out to even have a different type of meal. Harry and I would, would be given, we were given, I think we were given twenty-five cents, and we would be... and that would be, that was for if we went out we could to go the beach, Kitsilano, stay there the afternoon, have fish and chips, and then we'd come home. Favorite thing was, for Harry and I was we would go down to, then, at that time, Powell Street, which was called Little Tokyo or whatever it was called. It was, it wasn't... it wasn't, I think it was called Little Tokyo at that time, but more than not it was really Powell Street, and Powell Street was where the, the Japanese people lived. And more or less like it was almost like a ghetto of Japanese people. It was right downtown. And there are a lot of Chinese restaurants, there were two or three of them there, and we would go out and have, for twenty-five cents each, if we combined it, for fifty cents we can get a Chinese meal. We didn't want always to be eating in the -- 'cause eating in the, in the camp became quite monotonous. There was always the same things, like stew, that they could make easily, or at lunchtime, it was sandwiches, like bologna sandwiches or ham sandwiches, things like that. That's how they fed us. And breakfast would be things like porridge, and they would sometimes have an egg on some occasion.

TI: Now, when you would go down to, like, Powell Street where the Japanese, the Vancouver Japanese...

HS: Stayed, still living there, yeah.

TI: Were there restrictions placed upon them or anything like that?

HS: No, not when you, there was nothing, no restrictions as far as I know, but ownership of businesses had been restricted. So that you, all the Japanese owners were, I think, a lot of them had been, were closed down. Say, well, The New Canadian was down there, and that was closed. People, they had, people had travel agencies and things of that nature, they were, as far as I know, they were closed. So that the restaurants that were open down there were mainly Chinese restaurants. And there were a few, there definitely were a few Japanese grocery-type places that were still open when we first went there, but I think subsequently they were closed because the owners were shipped out. They were going out continuously from about all that year, all that summer, May, June, July, and they were being, gradually being deleted of the numbers of people living there. They were always being shipped away, and being told to leave. And what would happen is, more or less, was they had by this time, B.C. Security Commission had developed a system whereby they had figured out where they would put us, and in April of that year, Tom Shoyama told me that he and a real estate person by the name of Boltbee, Len Boltbee. As a matter of fact, Boltbee Real Estate still exists in Vancouver. That was the real estate company. He would, and Austin Taylor had decided he and Tom Shoyama would go into the interior of B.C., look for a place, look for places where Japanese people could live, remove to, outside the hundred mile area. Of course, right away, the first camp that went up was called Tashme, and it was at Hope, which is exactly a hundred miles from the coast. They put a camp in there, and they started building houses for them there. And then beyond that, then we had to go, they had to go to the interior of B.C., they had two problems. One was a lot of the, a lot of the, like the Okanogan cities like, like Kelowna and Vernon, they had put up big, right away, the city councils put up signs, they didn't want, as they said, they don't want "Japs" here. Whereas some of the other places, there was, they had to figure out where they can go, where there wouldn't be the problems with the local community. But at the same time, they still had to have housing for, for the Japanese.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.