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MA: So you were in Jerome, which is in Arkansas, and I was wondering if you noticed... Arkansas is in the South and a completely different racial dynamic down there, and if you noticed that when you moved, well, when you were sent to Jerome, if you noticed the, sort of, black-white segregation.

YK: Well, at the beginning, you're only in camp, you can't ever go outside of camp. So we didn't know what was happening outside. Our lives were totally different and isolated from the rest of the people in the town. But it was interesting, when I think that Jerome, a lot of it wasn't built yet, they had to, like the toilets weren't all put in, and there were no doors for the toilets. And the Japanese, who are... Japanese, well, especially the women, not to have any curtains or something. That's why the Japanese said, "Oh, we went to build our own curtains or something to have some privacy." And a lot of work people came into our camp because a lot of things weren't all fixed up yet. And we did notice that all the workers who came in were white, and yet we were in Arkansas. We said, "Gee, this is where blacks would be living, too. Wonder why all the workers were white?" It was really because of racism that these jobs only went to whites. So we didn't know much about racism. After a while we did, because when they start letting the Japanese in camp get four-hour passes or something to go shopping in Little Rock or somewhere, for the first time, they saw the segregation of blacks and all that. But everything took time, I guess, to learn.

But there were, I think, one or two incidences that happened in camp that were sort of shocking. And the camp, the people who run the camp, any time anything like this would happen, I think they tried to not let anyone know. And one was when a Japanese, it was a young guy, too, like twenty-three years old, I think he was a Kibei, he committed suicide by going right outside of the camp where the railroads... and he just lay down there and a train ran over him and killed him. Well, the camp certainly tried to hush that up, but you know how in camp, rumors go around so fast, everybody knows... and it was just shocking. And it shows that how being sent to a camp must have been so... I don't know if you'd say it's horrifying or at least negative, that someone had even felt he would commit suicide.

MA: And you said he was a Kibei?

YK: I think he was a Kibei because rumors were going around so fast that everybody was saying, "Do you know who he is?" And someone said they thought it was a Kibei, we're not sure. And there was another case where a young girl disappeared. Of course, the rumors went wild, but somehow or other, I don't know if the camp ever found out, but one young girl escaped from our camp, but she was found in Rohwer which isn't that far away. And somehow she found that there were, you know, young guys were working in commissary, which is working, you know, loading things on trucks and stuff like that. And she got the idea, I think she had a boyfriend in Rohwer, she wanted to go there. So she got one of those trucks to quietly put her on the truck so that she could go to Rohwer and be with the boyfriend. And I mean, those things always, everybody started talking. But it's interesting how things like that will happen.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.