Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Shimizu Interview
Narrator: Henry Shimizu
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: July 25 & 26, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-shenry-01-0040

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TI: And so once you had a house, would you take your meals inside your own house?

HS: Oh, yeah. We took a, once we got that, we would start making our own meals, and we were, we were given... I think we might have been given originally some, some help in terms of food, food products so that we could carry on our own, own activities there. But it was only, but we could, but everybody had money that they brought from the coast, and my father had the same thing, you see, had given my mother some money to bring with her to the, to the camps, and to keep, keep a little bit of money for food. That was the main thing that we needed, was food. And so to begin with, we ate in the bunkhouse while we were in the tent, but once we got our house and got our setup, then we started making our own meals. Because while you're in the tent, it was difficult to make any meals. So you went, we used to walk over to the, to the mess hall as they called it, and have our meals there. And that went on for about two or three months, and then we came back here, by the time November, December came about, we had our own house. 'Cause they were building it from the moment that the people like Shoyama and Len Boltbee had, they'd come back from their sightseeing -- not sightseeing, their survey, they sat down and worked out where they, where they were gonna send people. And by this time, they realized that they were going to be able to, their survey of all these buildings showed that there was no way that you were gonna be able to house the 22,000 people. They thought, they thought, "Oh, there's gonna be enough room," but it ended up that it only, those buildings could only house a small portion. So they realized they had to, they had to get a lot of, a lot of buildings, a lot of the houses built, shacks. You couldn't live in tents, 'cause they had army tents that they had for us, but they were World War I army tents. They didn't have the supplies for all that sort of thing, to have army tents, and, and to supply the mess hall with food and everything like that, they... and this guy, Austin Taylor, who was a sharp businessman, was able, apparently, at that time, in the middle of the war, with everything short, he went and somehow found, apparently he found seven million board feet of shiplap someplace. He got that shipped into, into the interior of B.C., and portioned it out to all the different camps, and they'd start building shiplap houses or shacks they were, basically. Two bedrooms, most of them were two bedrooms, one on each end, and a common area in the center. And they put two families in each. And of that families, most of the time they were people that knew each other, like ourselves, we're partners. Mr. Nishikaze and we're used to being together, and it wasn't a big problem for us. There were other places and other families, they had had a little more of a change in going into that new situation, because they were meeting up with a family they might know a little bit, but not that well. But still, now they were going to be housed together.

[Interruption]

TI: So you had just, we're now at New Denver, and you had just talked about some of the housing and how they're constructed, how they got together. Let's talk --

HS: But specifically on New Denver... New Denver was not what you would consider the typical camp. It was probably better than the typical camp. However, the setup was the same on all the camps in that the housing, although in New Denver we had very few ghost houses, like houses from ghost town times, empty houses, you did, however, have a few there. But in some of the other, like Slocan City had quite a few old, old buildings that were used as houses for the, for the evacuees, where, and Kaslo and Sandon had a lot. However, the majority of the housing was done by building these shiplap houses from that lumber that Taylor had found. Anyhow, these were shiplap houses, and there were two, almost three different types. One was single families, and those were very small houses. I forgot what the exact dimensions were, something in the neighborhood of 14' x 20' or so, or 14' x 16'. Then there were the most common type, shiplap houses, which were between about 16' by, 16' x 24'. And then there were a few larger ones like ours, which were 16 x 28 feet.

TI: What's interesting to me, though, although you were in the largest one, when I think of trying to house thousands and thousands of people, another way of doing it would have been to just construct barracks and have people there.

HS: They never did that.

TI: But this conscious decision to do it as family units...

HS: Single families, yes. Somehow, but there were a few single men's barrack-type setup, and they had, for instance, just near New Denver, up on the hill about two miles away was a place called Nelson Ranch, and that was, obviously belonged to a fellow by the name of Nelson, his ranch up there. They built a single man's hostel there, which housed I don't know how many men, but maybe in the neighborhood of twenty or thirty men, single men. There weren't that many -- there were still a lot of single men, but a lot of the single men had been sent to work camps, and they stayed in the work camps all during that period, and eventually a lot of them did move out east into Ontario. Because there was this continual push that they gave, that they were always coming around wondering whether or not you wanted to go to Toronto or to the sugar beets, or they wanted us out of B.C. There's no question that they were still getting pressure from, sort of, pressure groups in, on the West Coast, that kept trying to get rid of, as I said, the "enemy within us."

TI: But even though you were a hundred miles away, they still felt that your presence was negative.

HS: Yeah, that our presence... the thing was, I think they worried about, they kept thinking somehow we'll come back and reclaim our rights. Because, so one of the things they did was they sold all of our property so that there would be no property for you to come back to.

<End Segment 40> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.