<Begin Segment 14>

DM: So you mentioned that your mother had, was able to save enough money to buy you ice skates. Did you or your mother or your siblings work in camp?

AM: No. And, but I think that everyone got an allowance of some kind, and that's what she saved, I think.

DM: And how did she, how did she cope during all of this?

AM: Not very well. She was worried about my dad, she didn't -- because we would hear from him but we would hear from him -- oh, and this is another piece that I recognized some of the way, strategies that people used, the government uses. And that is every time we got a letter from him it came from a different place. So you could imagine what it was like for my mother to not know where he was, and had no concept of where these were geographically. But every single camp that I know, now identify as the Justice camps, or federal camps were where my dad was. I can, I can remember North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Kooskia, Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lordsburg, New Mexico, Sanford, Arizona. I mean, just time after time when I look at those places I can remember the letters coming from each of those places. So I had no idea why he would be moved like that, but I, then in recollection, in thinking about that time, he was forty... what was he? Forty-two at most, 'cause he was born in 1900 so he was forty. And he spoke and read English, so I suppose they thought that he had the potential, and because of his history as being part of the kendokai, that I suspect that they suspected that he was a potential "troublemaker," which could not have been more wrong. 'Cause the profile of him might seem that way, but he was a Buddhist and he never raised a hand to us kids at all. Just never thought... the only way he disciplined us was by talking to us about why we shouldn't do something. So I couldn't imagine him being a militant and organizing anything.

DM: So, so they moved him around from camp to camp.

AM: Uh-huh.

DM: Repeatedly.

AM: Yes.

DM: And you had mentioned also that you thought he was at one time at a, in a road gang when we spoke earlier?

AM: Yeah. Well, there was a place called Kooskia, it's pronounced "Kooskie," Idaho, which used to be, I understand now it used to be a federal prison which was abandoned during the war, and they put a prison there for people like my dad who volunteered to work. And this is, again, all of this is, historically finding out this through archival material, and that is the U.S. during the war wanted to build a transcontinental road. The road that they built, it was U.S. Highway number 12, and Kooskia, Idaho, itself was one of the road gangs that was built -- not built, but... and the workers were people who volunteered from the Justice camps like my dad. And I know my dad told me that the reason he chose to do that because Kooskia is only about a hundred miles north of where Minidoka was, and he felt that it would make it closer for him to reach us, I guess. But they built that, the Japanese Justice camp workers built Highway 12.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright ©2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.