<Begin Segment 12>

TI: And your family unit was your mother, stepfather, and you, just three of you?

SY: Three of us, we ate together, and they didn't allow me to eat with them. I was embarrassed because I was one of the few people that had to eat with their parents, but they believed in a family unity. But we had a lady by the name of Estelle Ishigo she was a Caucasian lady, and my mother would holler to her, "Mrs. Ishigo, we have opening space here," and she would come and eat with us.

TI: So I'm curious, how did others treat her? I mean, she's Caucasian, this is the character in Steven Okazaki's film Days of Waiting, but your mother was friendly with her.

SY: Well, because she was able to speak both, bilingual, and my mother was very friendly, open, and she always admired her beauty. You know, blonde hair, nice skin, and she always talked nice about her, always a very, very friendly person, but a lot of people were intimidated because she looked bigger than most of the Japanese ladies, although she was married to Arthur Ishigo. Arthur was a boilerman, and he was what, I call now, the first hippie we ever seen, long beard, and he was shoveling coal in the boiler room, and he would go out there in a blizzard without a shirt. And we thought, you know, the guy has to be nuts, I mean, we had coat and jacket and sweater and T-shirt and long johns and we're still cold, but not Arthur Ishigo, he was out there, and later on, he would entice me to go fishing with him, so we became real good friends.

TI: How did other families treat Arthur and Estelle at Heart Mountain?

SY: Well, we really don't know, because Estelle would be the one that would pursue the friendship to other people, those that would care to talk, but a lot people who could not speak English would not dare communicate with her. But she was one of these person that played in a band, she played the violin and the mandolin, so each week she would be up on the stage, on the front, and she stood out playing the mandolin with this little band, with a smiling face and so forth. Whenever she went out she was always sketching, she was an artist. And so she would, my mother, on a normal day, when I say normal, sunny day, they would talk in front of the magpie bird and communicate. I don't know what they talked about, but they talked for a long length of time, you know. And I'm sure one of the things that they were last to leave November 15, 1945, because they had no place to go, they didn't have the money, and it was a sad adventure for them. And I know that Arthur always wanted to be a movie, in the movies, some way or somehow, because he worked at Paramount at one time. But the other thing I mentioned was that there were a lot of group gangs, and that depends on where you live, the peers that you hung around with and so forth, so a lot of the parents, adults, knew what was happening, so they created a lot of sports activities, such as softball, the older teenagers taught us how to play football.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.