<Begin Segment 6>

[Ed. note: This transcript has been edited by the narrator]

SP: So about a year after you arrived in Tule Lake, it became a segregation camp. And I'm wondering if you felt any change in the group dynamic, or how people interacted?

SA: Very different.

SP: What changed? What was different?

SA: Well, I was still a teenager, but a lot of Kibeis came in, and they were very pro-Japan. And from Manzanar, they had their own group, very militant. They were, they had the, called Hoshidan, different groups from Arkansas. They came from all the other camps. And they were the ones that were all pro-Japanese because they were "no-nos." And insofar as Tule Lake is concerned, like a lot of the Sacramento people told me that they just stayed in camp, even if they were "yes" or "no" or whatever. And they did not force you to move. And Sacramento was close to the Tule Lake camp, so they didn't want to be moving to a (faraway) camp to, like Jerome, because they made you go to these (different) camps. Like, our family, I thought we were going to go to Hunt, Idaho, because had close friends there. But my father just did not want to move. And the "loyalty oath," he said, he had the paper that said he put down "yes." But they didn't force us to move, we just stayed. And I remember my father saying that, maybe we won't get back our farm in Bellevue. So he said, "If we don't get back our farm, " he said, "maybe we could go to Japan because Grandpa has a house there." So, it was a time of uncertainty. And my father just, I think he was, like I said, he was one of, he was a person who didn't, (and) couldn't readily make decisions because his father was always making decisions for him, even into adulthood. But anyway, we went back to Bellevue.

SP: And so, while you were still in camp, were you hearing stories about what was happening in Bellevue? Like the burnings of houses?

SA: We didn't hear that at all until we came back home. You don't hear about these things about other people when you're in camp, and so isolated and we didn't have a radio. The only thing we had that was coming in from the outside, we took the San Francisco Chronicle and our neighbor took the other newspaper. The (San Francisco Examiner) and... anyways, and once a week we would get (news) from the outside (...).

TI: So now I actually want to go back and talk about the differences after Tule Lake became a segregation camp. So you had all these individuals who came to Tule Lake from the different camps. How did sort of the ones who perhaps answered "yes" on the loyalty oath, how did they get along with this other group? And was there much mixing? Can you describe that a little bit more?

SA: Oh, well, you know, these militant Japanese groups had their own strong groups. I think it was just within the block. We didn't, we did everything within the block. And my father was influenced by a lot of these people within our block.

TI: So when you say influenced, what would be --

SA: Well, they'll say things like... oh, I think it was very confusing. They would say that, they would hear things like, "Oh, Japan is winning." Or, "You should have your children quit American school. They should strictly go to Japanese school." And that kind of thing was going on within the block. But (...) some blocks had (...) real strong leaders that were pro-Japanese (...). We were in Block 52, (...) and then they built some more blocks, (...) Block 59, 60, (etcetera). And they added on, because (Tule Lake) was the largest of the (concentration) camps, the concentration camps, (with a population of) about 20,000.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.