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FH: Then also, I was at Berkeley, had just finished Berkeley. There was a Dr. Thomas. Dr. Thomas, I think Dorothy Thomas. She wrote The Spoilage or something? Well, she wrote from the stuff that several of us, she got three camps, I think. And she got what I call observers, and we would, like a diary, write everything that happened in camp and give it to her.

TI: And so you were one of those diary writers?

FH: So I was a very bad one. I was so busy with something else that I didn't do a good job.

TI: And how did Dr. Thomas contact you?

FH: Well, she came into camp and asked for recruits. And I guess she would come in and talk to people and sit down, and, "Who can we ask?" I met Doris Hayashi, she got people from Cal. We were classmates. And there was Roy something, there were about four or five. And then two of them went to another camp from Topaz, and they were -- I mean, from Tanforan, and they were given permission to do this study.

TI: So Dorothy Thomas had enough clout, I guess, to say, "Okay, here's a team, can I have two of these people go to another camp?"

FH: She did. She did that, right. And then two went over to Arizona, as I remember. Roy, and there were Berkeley people. And there was a Charlie Kikuchi who was from Vallejo, and he was in our camp. I didn't know him until he joined this. He was kind of the leader. He wrote a book about it, and Charlie Kikuchi went and married Amemiya, a girl named Amemiya, who was a protegee of Graham, the dance teacher in New York City, famous. And Charlie passed away, but he was quite the consultant.

TI: And so what were kind of your instructions? What kind of things were you supposed to write about?

FH: Just anything that you observed that you just... just, she wanted to know how you felt and what you saw. Mine Okubo, the artist, she was there at the time. I didn't know her well, 'til later I got to know her.

TI: And then when you finished writing a diary, then you would just turn it in?

FH: Every week she'd come and pick it up, and talk. And we'd sit down and talk and said what was unusual this week and what did you see, what's happening. So some of those people were very, very attentive and concentrated, but I was a very loose cannon. And I didn't think much about the value of doing this, so I didn't do a good job.

TI: And how did other people react to you and the others taking notes and sharing this with...

FH: They don't know. So I was almost going to say we're kind of spies. Well, we were. It was open book, but people didn't know that we were doing this. I mean, it wasn't a daily news, it was just... some people knew, it was not a secret, but it was a small group that did this in several camps.

TI: Did the people, the note takers, did you guys ever talk amongst yourself in terms of why you were doing it, or if it was...

FH: Well, I'm sure she must have explained why. I didn't... I did it, but I didn't do a good job. I didn't do much. There's about eighty pages of what I put together for Tanforan and Topaz that's in the Bancroft Library at UC. I didn't know that. I finally got guilty, so I put something together and sent it to Dorothy Thomas, and she put it into the library. [Laughs] Someone, Art Hansen, he brought the whole thing, eighty-five pages, he made a copy and he brings it to me. I said, "Oh, no. I don't remember doing it." I didn't remember doing that. And he says, "You wrote it, Fred, 'cause your name's there." I read it. At first, I read it, I said, "Gee, this is not bad. Pretty good writing." That's my first thing. Then I see some personal things about my father and my, you know, my first father and my second father, and so I said, "It had to be me writing this." Little by little... they say people forget. That's, it does happen, actually. It happened to me. I put it away, and sometimes unfortunate or trauma, you try to forget it. I must have tried to forget it because it didn't come back. And now I accept it, but at that time, I just, I don't remember ever, I don't know when I had the time to do it.

TI: When you went back and when Art Hansen showed you those eighty-five pages...

FH: He brought it to me, yeah.

TI: ...and you read it, did it bring back memories?

FH: It did.

TI: And what kind of feelings did you have when those memories came back?

FH: Well, I said, first I said, "This is well-written, pretty good writing. It's not me." And secondly, it's lot of personal kind of stuff, but it was a very objective kind of reporting for me. You could get the little bit, selves. So I didn't really feel a strong sense of ownership.

TI: Okay, that was interesting.

FH: Still at Bancroft. It's someplace, my copy's someplace, but I don't know. [Laughs]

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.