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TI: Okay, so I'm going to... so your father was picked up, and then you, your brother Jim and your mother go to Puyallup, "Camp Harmony," the Puyallup Assembly Center. And one of the things that you mentioned in your last interview that I wanted to follow up on was, I'm always curious about how things were organized at Puyallup in terms of how things got done. And you mentioned how your brother saw a need, that the elderly or the sick, it was hard for them to go get food, and so your brother helped organize this tray service where (the waitresses) would get the food, put it on a tray, and bring it to the people that had a hard time going to get the food. How did your brother come up with that idea, or tell me about how your brother did that, I'm curious how that happened.

GA: He was working in the kitchen, and, well, I guess he's monitoring all the tray, people getting the tray and things to serve themselves. And he started to think about, "Gee, there's some people that are sick who can't get out, and how are they gonna be fed?" And so he decided that there's a good idea, he'd go over there and see if he could ask them to set up a service. So he went over to the head, I can't remember, I guess the head was Jimmy Sakamoto, who was the head of JACL, a lot of the activities, whether it was him or anybody else in the upper JACL. He asked permission to organize a tray crew, and they ignored him completely. So he says, "Well, then I'm gonna go up to the head." And he went up to the head of the assembly center and talked to them.

TI: Before you continue the story, I'm curious, so you said he was ignored by the JACL, you mentioned possibly Jimmy Sakamoto. Why do you think he was ignored by the JACL? This seemed like a pretty good idea.

GA: Well, I guess, I don't know, really, it's just my guess, is that, "There are other things that are more important, we'll worry about that later." With that attitude, well, people get hungry and they gotta eat. And so on the other hand, my brother was thinking, "That is important, you've got to feed them, we have to pay attention to that right away." So there was a difference right there.

TI: Okay, so then your brother went to the, directly to the administration to present the idea. So go ahead and explain what happened next.

GA: Well, naturally, the JACL didn't like it, and he was more or less kind of a blacklist, where they looked at him as kind of a troublemaker at that time, 'cause he won't listen to whatever the JACL dictates. So...

TI: And at this point, how about the administration? Did they think it was a pretty good idea and so they let him do it?

GA: They did. So during the, when we were interned over there for about, what is it, about five or six months, we did form a tray committee, and the girls were, all the girls would deliver and take back the trays used by the sick people who were bedridden or unable to walk. So that was a very, quite a success, and all the people showed their appreciation, especially the ones that has the survivor, the wife or the husband that is in that condition.

TI: So when you say "showed their appreciation," who did they show their appreciation to? To your brother, to the administration, to the JACL, I mean, who got the credit for this?

GA: Really, it was appreciated with all the tray girls, they were, 'cause 'they' meaning the parents, they didn't know who to say who is the one to, for them to go show their appreciation so they told the tray girls, and also the tray girls told them that my brother Jim was the head of it. And therefore they thanked him for a lot of the activities that he started. He was one of those organizers himself. Ever since he was young, he would organize a lot of things, and this was one of the things that came to his mind.

TI: And in this case, it sounded like it caused some friction with the, with the other Japanese American leaders, in particular the JACL, who felt that, yeah, I guess they didn't like that he did this.

GA: Well, I guess they didn't like him going over their head. I think that happens all over, where people don't listen so they go above their head and then they become blacklist and anything that's troublesome, it's their fault. And since then, my brother was kind of looked at as a, kind of a troublemaker.

TI: And do you think that caused him problems later on at Puyallup and then later on in Minidoka with this group?

GA: Not this group. He didn't pinpoint down to any one particular group, but he had seen some activities going on after we were evacuated to Hunt, that some activities were being done that shouldn't have been, namely, black marketing, using or taking all the sports equipment away and either giving it away or selling it to people outside. And so the inmates there, the kids, had no equipment to play baseball or football with. And that was one of the things that he tried to tell the administration, and the administration kind of ignored him. So he wrote a letter to Washington, D.C. to explain to them that that is one of the reasons why the people in the internment camps, their food is scarce, a lot of the meats was cut short, and sports equipment, that kids would need for everybody, the activities were gone. And so he wrote to them, and apparently they came down, and the administration didn't like that, either. And so he was pretty much getting into the blacklist, known as a "troublemaker."

TI: And the reason he did this was 'cause he saw something that was not working or was unfair, and then he would try to fix it working with the people that were in charge, but when they didn't do it, he would go above them to the next level to get changes.

GA: That's right.

TI: And then those people didn't like it, so they would then, sort of, label him as a "troublemaker," someone who didn't work together to solve the problem.

GA: Perhaps that may have been, or something else, maybe it's my dad, but our family was kept in the camp. We couldn't leave camp, so...

TI: So I've read about this, so it's called like a stop-order?

GA: Yeah.

TI: Or some kind of, you're put on a list where you're now allowed to do, like, those temporary leaves to go into town to shop.

GA: That's right.

TI: So your family was on that list?

GA: We couldn't get out, therefore we were there the duration.

TI: And so how did you know you were on that list? I mean, was it, did you just...

GA: Applications were made to see if we can get out toward, I think it was toward Salt Lake where they had the sugar beet farm and all that, and we wanted to get an application to get out there to earn a little bit of money, and our request was, we were told that we were on a (stop order) list, that we couldn't get out. So during all that time, we really officially didn't get out of camp. We did sneak out here and there to, well, go out rattlesnake hunting or something like that, but officially, we couldn't get out.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.