<Begin Segment 48>

TI: There was a sense of Japanese culture even in...

HS: Culture, oh, yeah. That was very, and it probably flourished more in the camps because you, for once in your life, you could do this without any restriction. We did all this, and nobody ever told you you couldn't do this. The only thing you weren't allowed to do, if some guy wanted to put up the Japanese flag in the camp, you see, it would, that would cause a great problem with the RCMP.

TI: And perhaps in addition to no restrictions, there was probably more time.

HS: Oh, yeah, there was nothing else to do.

TI: Especially for the adults...

HS: Adults, mostly adults, like my father worked, there was a sanitarium that went up there to look for (...) TB and the chronically ill. They built this big sanitarium hospital building, it was finished by the winter of '43, and then all the, they really literally had to get every person of Japanese ancestry off the coast. There had been a number of them who were paraplegics, TB, chronically ill people who were in hospitals in Vancouver and along the West Coast. They were eventually shipped out to New Denver and put into this hospital there, which had a hundred beds. And my father, who worked in that hospital, so did Mr. Nishikaze, the cook, of course, he became the cook, the major cook for that place. And he would go there early in the morning and he would get the stoves going, he would wash the dining room, wash the kitchen, get it all set, and set up the menu. And by noon, he was finished. He might have made some bread, but other than that, he did, he said he did not do any extensive cooking there. He set up the menu and how they're supposed to do it, he told people how they're supposed to bake this, and then by noon he was finished, and he would come back to the house. And from thereon, he was free. Well, he decided, well, everybody had built vegetable gardens, but he, for some reason, decided he'll build a rock garden, and he did this for the next five years, every day. He built this rock garden...

TI: So more of a traditional Japanese type of rock garden?

HS: No, he had no idea, he was not a gardener. He had to go and ask people how to, how to put in the flowers, and which flower. He had to, people had to teach him. In fact, he went to, he happened to go to the village of New Denver and saw some nice gardens there that people had put in there, and so he talked to these people about what he should do, and they gave him plants to put in his place. They told him where, what he should do, he went along the riverbed and picked up rocks. And he would carry rocks daily, bringing rocks into this rock garden, and eventually, it got so big and so many big rocks that he, friends built him a wheelbarrow so he could bring it in, and then that was even too big, too much, so they even used to go out in the truck, and truck in huge boulders for him so that he could build this rock garden. And he kept building this for, for, like I say, for five years. And it became quite a huge, it became an attraction because (...) so big. I don't know how many acres it was, but it went up about twenty feet high, but it was not a Japanese garden. But like I say, people came from all over to see this place. They came from Nelson, B.C., and they looked at it, and some guy, some photographer there decided, "Hey, this is something," so he took a picture of it and then he started making postcards of this Japanese rock garden. But when you look at it, it's not a Japanese rock garden.

TI: But it had a Japanese influence, probably.

HS: Japanese influence, that's it. But it was not like a Japanese garden. Absolutely different from an ordinary Japanese garden, because Mr. Nishikaze didn't even know what a Japanese garden was in a lot of ways. He did have a little (idea), he remotely remembered ones in Japan when he was young, but he came to Canada when he was fifteen, so he didn't have, his ideas of a garden was as much as you, put in as much as you can, and he did everything. Made little ponds, made a little waterfall, but the waterfall had no water in it, other than the fact when he had the pail of water and he put the waterfall in.

TI: So here's a great example of someone, if he were in Prince Rupert, he'd be busy just working.

HS: Working all the time, that's right.

TI: And actually having more time to --

HS: That's right, that's all he did.

TI: -- to purse a activity, a hobby.

HS: A hobby. And Nishikaze was the fellow that supposedly was supposed to die of cancer of the stomach back in '36. Well, he was, like I say, he somehow recovered, and ever since then, he somehow had this idea that he wanted the opportunity to make a rock garden, so away he went and did this. And this rock garden eventually, the unfortunate part of it is that when he left, and he went to the Ritz-Carlton in Montreal, he put it in the care of some of the people, locals, and they looked after it for a few months, and then eventually it, it was bulldozed down, because they needed more room for a road or something like that.

TI: Oh no, how unfortunate.

HS: And it's gone. There's not a vestige, there's not a piece of it that's survived, other than the fact that he built a little gate out of rock, and somebody told me some, he saw that in another garden someplace around there. Somebody had, had retrieved that part and made it into, put it in his own garden.

TI: So I'm curious, in a similar way, did you, we had asked earlier where you had, had some art training back at Prince Rupert. Did you pursue or did you do any art at New Denver?

HS: There I, yes, we did have, we have an art, we did have an art, area of art -- no, there were was kind of a pseudo-art class at the high school. Not a, not a exceptionally hard, most of it was we, they would ask us to do some drawing every once in a while, that was done, that was all it was. There was really no art class, so to speak.

<End Segment 48> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.