<Begin Segment 26>

TI: So after, some months after the war, the government started rounding up Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast and putting them in camps.

BH: Uh-huh. Well, they didn't do that to us.

TI: Right. But yet Paul's, some of Paul's family that lived in Seattle were put into camps.

BH: Oh, yeah.

TI: So you had heard about this. And so what were you thinking when this was happening?

BH: Oh, well, we didn't know. We thought we were just like gypsies and just travel around looking for work, but that didn't happen to us. We were lucky. People in Rock Springs were very nice, people that, the regular people that we used to associate with, they were very nice. But some of the people that came in from the east like Arkansas and Kansas, and they already had a house, because Rock Springs was booming at the time. It grew from twenty thousand to forty thousand during the war or something like that. It just increased.

TI: And why was that? What was happening in Rock Springs that made it so...

BH: The coal mining.

TI: Oh, so the country needed coal, so it was...

BH: Uh-huh.

TI: But then unfortunately, Japanese couldn't work there because of the...

BH: No, like I say, they got hired, but they didn't work anymore after that, when they said they'd get killed, especially under the mine where nobody would know them.

TI: But going back to the West Coast Japanese going to camps, did you and Paul ever talk about that in terms of what was happening?

BH: Oh, they were lucky, at least they have a place to go. 'Cause we found out how nice it was, meal was served and they just go and didn't have to do any work. So we felt kind of envious. But we visited the other Horiuchis' parents, was in Minidoka, so we went to visit them once. And we took our car and went from Wyoming to, no, we lived in Salt Lake -- not Salt Lake, Ogden, Utah, at that time. We drove to Minidoka. And went in, I says, "Gosh, how nice," but they had a tower there where the guards were there watching everybody. So we were afraid about leaving the car and going to the thing, and they said, "Oh, no, you can take the car in." This was quite some time later. So we drove the car, and people were so happy to see us with a car, and nobody else had a car there because they couldn't own one. But it was scary to be there because of the police.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.