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MA: Okay, so you were in Santa Anita for seven months and then Jerome, which is in Arkansas. Tell me about your time in Jerome and arriving there and being in Arkansas and about that time for you.

YK: Well, in Santa Anita, I mean... well, you know when you first get there, they let you choose -- well, they first told us, "Anyone under eighteen has to go to school. Anyone over eighteen has to work." And at least you have a choice what kind of job you want to do. So in Santa Anita, I volunteered as a nurse's aide. Well, we all got paid eight dollars a month, because nurse's aide was a lower division kind of work, we didn't have to really train. But those who were skilled got twelve dollars a month, and professionals, lawyers and doctors, maybe some teachers, got sixteen to nineteen dollars. Most of us all got eight dollars.

But in Santa Anita, right away what I wanted to do was be a Sunday school teacher because I was a Sunday school teacher in our hometown. In our hometown, all the kids were white, and I always wanted to have Asian kids. And I so I was glad when I had almost the same age, junior high school kids, in Sunday school. And these were really bright Asian kids. I mean, it was wonderful to work with them because we had so much to talk about. What's gonna happen to us because we're Japanese? Is there anything we could even do in camp that could be more of a service to the communities? And that's when, in Sunday school, these kids who were, I don't know, thirteen, fourteen years old, they said, "Why don't we write to our Nisei soldiers?" I had at first only five or six kids. But coincidentally, each one had a brother in service and I had a brother in service. And so they said, "Okay, let's let the people of Santa Anita know that we are going to start writing to all our Nisei soldiers that we are behind them, 'we know it must be tough right now to be in the position you are, but we are going to support you through the war, and we would like to correspond with you.'" And when other kids heard about it, the Sunday school grew quickly. First, thirty, forty kids, fifty, 'til we had about sixty kids. More, not because of the Sunday school, but they all wanted to do something, too. And so they joined just so they could... first we only had a few names, but all the Sunday school kids went out and asked their neighbors, "Do you have a son or a brother or someone, uncle in service?" Got their address, and these kids started to write to them. And so in that seven months, we had, I think, before we left Santa Anita, we had maybe a couple hundred names of, you know, Nisei soldiers. Because a lot of 'em were in training, and it was just '42, so they weren't yet overseas yet, but they were in training. And the kids were getting letters back, and the soldiers were so happy that they're, like these would be their younger sisters, thought of them. And parents got interested in our program. My mother got really into it herself, because she was lonely, she had just lost her husband, and she said, "Oh, I'll write, too." And she would write to the soldiers like they were her sons, you know. And so Santa Anita went by sort of quickly, we thought, and then we were in Jerome.

MA: Is that something you continued in Jerome?

YK: What?

MA: Is that, did you continue that in Jerome, the letter writing?

YK: Yes, uh-huh. But we added one more group. Besides writing to the Nisei soldiers, we found out that there was one group of Japanese who were not sent out of California because they were, they had an illness. They were at Hillcrest Sanitarium.

MA: Tuberculosis?

YK: Yeah. And they didn't want to, I guess, move them. And so when we heard about that, we said, "Look, why don't you" -- the kids, who were thirteen, fourteen, who could write -- "besides the soldiers, write to these patients. They must feel lonely that all the other Japanese have been sent out of California and they're the only ones." How did you know about tuberculosis? You seem to know already.

MA: Well, we, Densho has done interviews where people have mentioned family members who have stayed behind, who had to stay behind in the sanitarium in Seattle and in Los Angeles. Various people have stories about that.

YK: Oh, uh-huh. Because a lot of people didn't know. When we first heard about it, we said, "Oh my goodness." You would think they would send everybody out, but because, I guess, tuberculosis could be contagious, I guess, they kept 'em there. And gee, those people, too, the sanitarium, they were happy to be remembered. And so it was nice, they had the two groups to write to. And then we went on and continued that work in Jerome, and we got Rohwer kids of the same age. Well, from Santa Anita, they were all sent out to different, ten different camps. So then, and they were called Crusaders. The Crusaders then continued the work in all the other camps. Some camps were, were better than others in being able to continue.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.