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TI: Let's talk about your, going to the camp days now, and your experiences. Are there any events or memories that sort of stand out in your mind when you think back to those days?

WH: Going to camp?

TI: Yeah, going to camp, and your time at camp. In fact, why don't you tell us which camp you went to and...

WH: Well, I went to Manzanar. There are a couple of things about the trip. One was there was a teenage, probably eighteen-year-old soldier guarding us on the bus, we went on busses. Some people went on trains, we went up on buses. And he says, "Oh, you'll be coming back in two weeks." He had no idea what was going on.

TI: So he was about your age, too. I mean, he was a little older.

WH: Yeah, a little older, but you know. The thing is that most people, most Americans of the time, the teachers and so forth, they had no idea what was going on. I was in the gymnastics team, my gym teacher says, "Oh, you know." I said, "I don't think I'll be back." We left during Easter break or Spring vacation. I think they used to call it Easter break. And he said, "Oh, you'll be back." So he'll leave my stuff there in the locker for me. And of course I didn't make it back. But he had no idea what was going on. And most people had no idea what was going on. So that was one thing. And the other thing is when I arrived, I'd never, I'd never seen so many Japanese faces in my life. I'd never lived in a Japanese community, except in West L.A. But even there it wasn't, it certainly wasn't solid Japanese. But here it was solid Japanese, everybody was Japanese. And it was kind of mind-boggling for someone who... most of my friends were white when I was going to school.

TI: I mean, was it, it must have been exciting. You were a teenage boy, and to see all these Japanese, I mean, it must have been interesting or how did that feel?

WH: Well, the only thing that was nice, was the girls. Because all of a sudden you had a, you know, they were your peers, your true peers, you know. And we were sort of attracted to each other and stuff like that. That was a real interesting, new dynamic in life. I don't think I handled it very well. But I think the, it took quite a bit of adjustment.

And then the thing is that we went to Manzanar because my mother had friends who were from Terminal Island, and the Terminal Island people had been kicked off the island by the Navy. It's pretty much like Bainbridge except it happened earlier and they were only given... initially they were given twenty-four hours notice and then the church intervened and said, you know, that's really impossible, so they were given forty-eight hours notice. And the reason it was impossible was because the fathers had all, most of the fathers, the fisherman fathers, were all interned. And so they were among the first contingent to go to Manzanar. They weren't the first, but among the first. I think the first contingent were from Bainbridge Island in Seattle because they had to leave Bainbridge Island, they had no place to go. And the same thing happened to Terminal Island, but they... I don't know how they managed. They doubled up, living with relatives, moving into churches or, you know, it was really rough. And so anyway, we decided to go up with the people from Terminal Island. So we lived in the middle of the Terminal Island community in Manzanar. And the Terminal Island community is a very "in" group. They were pretty much isolated from the rest of the Japanese Americans in L.A., because they lived on an island and they had to take a... I don't think it was a bridge, they had to take the ferry to get to San Pedro.

TI: Well, I imagine, too, as a fishing community, they were a probably sort of working-class, rougher.

WH: Right, they had, it was all self-contained. The grammar school was there, the Japanese language school. They only left the island, the kids, when they went to high school. And they spoke Japanese. They had sort of a, their own variety of the Japanese language, it had a lot of things that were a little bit different, things stuck in there. And there's a guy who has done a paper on that, on the Terminal Island community, and it's really... I've heard him speak. It's very interesting. Because he knows the language, he grew up there. He talks about all the... and he uses these Japanese phrases, "Oh yeah, I remember that." And they are kind of, you know, if you were from Japan you wouldn't understand what they're talking about because they're sort of a mixture of Japanese and English.

TI: And so you really bring it, when you go to Manzanar or think of Manzanar, you bring all these different components of, I mean, again, it's not a homogeneous group. I mean, they came from different communities.

WH: No, no. Oh, yeah.

TI: Rural, fishing, and you're all pulled together.

WH: Well, the Terminal Island people didn't get along with everybody else. Because they were very Japanese, "Japanesey." I mean, they spoke Japanese and everybody had Japanese names, first names. Nobody had an English first name. And then after camp when I ran into these kids, my friends, they all had English first names. I said what, "Well, wait a minute, what happened to your Japanese first name?" [Laughs] I was really a little disoriented. They'd have some name, and I said, "No, no, you were so and so, you were so and so." And now I think most of them now have sort of reverted to, well, a lot of them reverted back, some of them, well, reverted back to their Japanese names. But I guess they tried to transform themselves or something, I don't know.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.