<Begin Segment 28>

AH: So you were in a kind of an anomalous position. You had some skills that allowed the Bureau of Reclamation to use those skills, and you could go out of the camp for those purposes to Burley, Idaho but you really couldn't go by yourself and go off to school in Minnesota or in Texas. Right?

JA: See, the whole thing was, to go out to Burley, Idaho we had to stop in one place -- I thought it was a place called Eden -- to have coffee and that's where at the beginning the proprietor was a small cafeteria or cafe run by man and wife and we weren't talking too much. But the person that I am, I'm kind of curious so I get kind of talking to him, and he told me how the camp is being ransacked. Here, he says, "The coffee you're drinking, hey, somebody stole it from camp. The sugar you eat, stole from camp." So, I said, "Well, who is it?" "It's the camp personnel." And they said, "The big boxcar from where they steal these things..." A boxcar you got two big doors. They come together and they have one inch iron bar. And at the bottom they have a flange with a hole, so they line the holes up and instead of snapping the lock, they would just line it up so somebody could come up and just turn the lock open and steal whatever -- and at our cost. So I found out that the camp people, personnel, not the Japanese personnel or maybe there could have been, were stealing our food, and selling for profit. Then at the same time, the camp people had piggery way out, out beyond the border and here you see a mountain of the food that we're supposed to be using. And everything that was sent to camp they had blue cross. Now, if it were rice, the sack will have blue cross on it. If it were in carton, the carton would have blue cross and whatever the contents, you know, they're feeding it to the hogs. And I saw, and I was told how they were stealing it. And all of that now starts to... when I had it in the back, now it's starting to come forward.

AH: I'm curious about this, and it seems like something of a contradiction, but I'm sure you can resolve it. On the one hand you're wanting to get out of camp and go to school at Minnesota --

JA: Or go to work.

AH: Or go to work. But I'm thinking that you're an oldest son in the family, your father is off in a Department of Justice camp and it's just your mom and a younger brother there. How could you just go off to school and leave them in a situation --

JA: Or go to work, go to work. Now, if I were able to go to work, then I would get them out of camp, so that was my idea. Go to school and if I work, then I could get my brother and my mother out of camp. And that's why it was not just school only, it was to get my mother and brother out of camp.

AH: Did you make the choice of Minnesota and Texas on the grounds of academic reasons -- they have good engineering schools -- or did you make it on the grounds that these were easier places to relocate?

JA: No, they were accepting people out of camp.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.