<Begin Segment 26>

MN: Today is September 1, 2010. We have in the room Takeko Mayeda Miyatake and Archie Atsufumi Miyatake, and Dana Hoshide is on the video and I will be interviewing, my name is Martha Nakagawa, and we are at the Centenary United Methodist Church. Okay Archie, off camera yesterday you mentioned something which I found really interesting and I wanted for you to share about. Right after Pearl Harbor, when the government had curfews and travel restrictions and then the Isseis had to get photo IDs, now how was your father involved in that?

AM: Yes, well, we were limited to five mile radius from where we lived, so that's with all the Japanese, so when this government required everybody to make an ID photograph instead of those people going, well, there were some, like people way out in Oxnard, but they didn't know where to go. So my father got a special permission to go over there and we spent one, two, about two days up there and we did all the photographing of the Issei people individually so they don't have to come all the way into Los Angeles to have their photograph taken. So that kind of saved a lot of time for the people in Oxnard, so my father, with that intention, he got special permission to go, go to Oxnard. And so at that time my father had a little panel, a van type of car where he, he made a darkroom in the, in this car so he could develop the film right there, so I went to help him on that.

MN: Where did he have to get the permission from? Did he go to the FBI, or where is this permission handed out?

AM: I really don't know where, how he got the permission, but anyway, he got the permission from the government, I'm sure it was, and he went up there, he told 'em the reason why he would like to get the permission, so it saved a lot of people from individually trying to get a permission to travel far, far to get pictures taken. And then they required certain head size and things like that, so it was pretty hard to go to lot of different places, studios to have pictures taken because they all have to learn the size and had to be certain head size on the photograph itself, so with that thing considered my father thought that it'd be best if one studio tried to do most of the work in this place, Oxnard. And, of course, there weren't that many people. Well, there were quite a few, but compared to Los Angeles it was a lot smaller population of the people.

MN: Did he do people from Los Angeles or people in West L.A. or Gardena?

AM: Yes.

MN: But there were other photographers who also did those people.

AM: Yes.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.