<Begin Segment 12>

MN: Now, December 1942, Manzanar had a riot. Were you there to witness this?

BK: Yeah, I was there as a lot of us. There's no activity in, in camp. And I think it was summer day, and there were people yelling. I don't know what caused the yelling. I think there was still this animosity between the, the Kibei group, who were pro-Japan, and the JACL, and they felt that the JACL had recommended that we be in camps. Anyway, they were looking for some people who were JACL people. And they thought that the administration had protected them, and so I hear that some of them went up in the hospital where, I think, the JACL members were being protected. That's what the rumor was. So they went up there and went through all the hospital looking for JACL leaders. They couldn't find them. They came out. They thought that maybe he was being held in protective custody in the jail, but the jail was in the front of the camp, so they came down -- they had hachimakis on, the Kibeis -- and they were making... they must've been drinking something, shochu or something. And they make a lot of noise and going down to the base of the camp where the local, I guess, temporary police (jail) was, and one barrack was used as a holding tank.

They went down there thinking that maybe that's where they were being held, and as they went down they were making noise and the crowd followed them. And so they went towards the front of the camp, near the highway, and they were making a lot of noise. All of a sudden the camp called out the guards, and so the military people came out with their jeeps and they formed jeeps on the side of the barrack that housed, what was used as a jail, and had the lights flashing towards the crowd. And it was dusk. It was dark, and so you could see the jeeps' headlights flash towards the crowd and the crowd standing, knowing not what to do, and these Kibeis now starting to throw rocks against the jail. And pretty soon they're making a lot of noise and they were, claim that they were being held in jail, the leaders of the JACL or whatever, and pretty soon things got nervous and somebody fired a gun. And once the gun was fired several people got shot and killed. I heard it, a gun fire and I ran all the way home, I mean, to my barrack. I couldn't explain to my folks what happened because they, they didn't understand what was going on. So that's what happened that one night. There were, several people were shot, and they were running away and shot. So some of them were shot in the back, which didn't look good for the military people, to people, to shoot people while they're running away. But anyways, it was a bad experience for everybody. And you can't blame the people that were incarcerated. I mean, they didn't know what was happening. The government really didn't have cause to put us in to begin with, but they felt that the JACL leaders were those responsible for making a deal with the government and that's why we ended up in camp. And I really don't know today if that's true or not, but there's some evidence that the JACL people were involved. And maybe they were thinking about the safety of the people more so than anything else. I have no idea. I'm not gonna get into that because that's past history.

MN: But you're a teenager at that time. I mean, were you scared? What was going through your mind, being in this camp and this...

BK: I didn't know what was going on. We were sixteen years old. What did we know about politics? Nothing. I didn't know why they were yelling. I didn't know why they were shooting. And we were in the dark, so as far as I... I didn't know what relations the JACL had with the community. Nothing. Didn't know what JACL represented. But that was another phase of our growing up, finding that there were different elements in our community, antagonistic and some maybe more cooperative with the government. There's a lot that's been talked about, but I don't know whatever, what really happened.

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