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TI: Before we go there, let's go back to Hastings Park and just finish up there. Any other kind of memories or stories that you have about Hastings Park?

HS: Well, one of the memories I have of Hastings Park was, was the fact that although there was a fence around Hastings Park, and you weren't allowed to leave the park, you could actually leave the park by just jumping over the fence. And that was very simply done, because it's a great big, one of these big dipper roller coasters, and the roller coaster would go right close to the fence, and you just have to climb yourself up the roller coaster and jump over the fence, which was only about eight feet high. And so you just come right over there, and then you just jump the fence, and you could go out. The problem was to get back in; that was the only difficulty. And so, so you had to sort of sneak back in somehow when you felt, if there's a number of people there, so that you could sort of sneak in with them. And I know a lot of kids used to try to jump out, spend the day in Vancouver and come, sneak in, back into the camp. Because there's no place -- if you got out, that's fine, but where do you go? You look, you're a visible minority, you can't sleep in the park or anything like that because you'd be caught. So what you end up with is you'd have to come back to the camp. And I, I suppose there may have been some cases where people slipped out and never came back, but where would you go? That was the big problem.

TI: Did any of the boys or any of the people get in trouble for doing that?

HS: Well, I can't, I don't remember anybody that got into trouble, because I don't believe that once, once the camp got, once the Hastings Park got going, I don't believe that the people that were looking, like the guards, the guards were not RCMP. They had maybe one or two people there that were RCMP, but the majority of the guards were what they called commissionaires. That's where they got the term commissionaires, they were B.C., B.C. Security Commission employees. And they hired a whole bunch of World War I veterans who were willing to, 'cause it gave 'em a job. The old guys that, by this time, they'd be in, certainly over the age of fifty years of age, forty or fifty years of age, and then even older, because they'd been in World War I. They made it a point of appointing people who were originally veterans, figuring that they're much more trustworthy as guards. And they became, they were, like they would be, they would have armbands saying B.C. Security, B.C. Security Commission, and they were called commissionaires and they, they would guard the entrance gates. They would do a lot of the administrative stuff inside the camp, oversee things, they would be the... so these were people --

TI: Did you ever get a chance to ever chat with these men?

HS: No, not myself, but I know that my, the sister, not my sisters, but Harry's sisters who were older, were much more... and they would, they would get very friendly with them and they would find out what to do, how to get out easily. So often the guys would, it wasn't like it was, not like a concentration camp. They were not concerned about people leaving and coming so much. But we, as kids, we're twelve, thirteen, fourteen era, we were very concerned that, that this was like a prison. We always felt like it was a prison, but we realized we could actually get out without much difficulty and we could, we could always sneak back in. And people were doing it all the time. The camp, the Hastings Park only lasted about six months or so. It was, you know what a manning depot is? Like in the army, they bring all the soldiers into the area and get them ready to be shipped to overseas or shipped someplace else. That was the, this was just a temporary stop so they could organize where we were gonna go. To move 22,000 people was a big job, just like it was in the States. 'Cause you had over 200,000.

TI: Right. So I'm curious, when, in your sort of excursions out in Vancouver, did you ever experience any anti-Japanese sentiment?

HS: Well, in a way, they never knew whether we were Japanese or Chinese. That's the biggest, that was the biggest thing. We rarely did experience this in Vancouver, because the ordinary Caucasian in Vancouver was never sure whether you were Japanese or Chinese. In fact, there were a few, a number of Chinese began walking around town in Vancouver, we heard, with a button that says "I'm Chinese," so that they wouldn't be mistaken for Japanese. [Laughs] There's, just like that guy Gordon Hirabayashi in Washington here, saying that he, he was obviously flaunting curfew laws, and he, he said he deliberately got himself, went past police stations, hung around there hoping that someone would arrest him because they were going to make a court case out of it. The lawyers were going to fight his deportation. And so he said he wanted to do this, but nobody ever picked up on him because they thought he was probably Chinese and didn't say anything. I mean, he actually said, "I had to go to the FBI office," eventually, after doing this for a number of days and hoping that they would pick him up. They didn't pick him up, so he had to go to the FBI office and tell him who he was. "I'm, I'm defying your curfew." He had to tell them that, and then they, all of a sudden they got all huffy about things and put him into jail. But prior to that -- and it's the same with most of the people. When we were in Vancouver, we were a visible minority, but in another way, we were invisible because we looked too much like Chinese.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.