<Begin Segment 27>

MN: And then I wanted to ask you, now, I'm gonna skip to camp now and I wanted to ask you about this Manzanar Cooperative, and why did your father have to shoot under the Manzanar Cooperative?

AM: Anything to do with business, it was better to be under the Manzanar Cooperative Enterprise because they got the permission to and the regulation as to how business should be done in a place like that, so in order to have that control of that, that's why they set up this Manzanar Cooperative Enterprise, so there'll be no way for any individual to commercialize on taking, doing business in the camp itself. Because everybody's income was very limited, so therefore this Manzanar Cooperative Enterprise had a system where when people get receipt from whatever they bought they were told to keep the receipts so they could turn in all the receipts and then, depending on the profits and margin of profits and things, you get a rebate from the receipt that you have. So that's why my father was given okay to do business under the Manzanar Cooperative Enterprise, so whenever the profit is, depending on how big the profit was from the business, the people were, had the receipts from the purchase. They would get a refund according to the profit.

MN: So your father was one business under the cooperative.

AM: Yes.

MN: And so did other businesses, like the canteen, was that under the cooperative?

AM: Yes, canteen and dry goods store. I can't think of it right now, but there were a few others.

MN: So when your father shot pictures, did he always put on the photo "Manzanar Cooperative" on it?

AM: Not really. He didn't have to go that far. But, of course, it was, he used his name, Toyo Miyatake, and then he would stamp the name Toyo Miyatake on the corner of the picture. He called it embossing.

MN: 'Cause I saw that photo yesterday that you brought, the long photo with the cooperative name on it.

AM: Oh, yeah. That's right, yeah. It did have that.

MN: But that was not always put onto the photo.

AM: Well, if it's a group picture or a big picture like that, or a group picture, we would put that on there. Not on the individual portraits and things. Some of it we did.

MN: Now, I'm gonna pick up where we left off yesterday, right towards the end of the war, and now your wife-to-be, Takeko, left camp before you did. And how did you two keep in touch?

AM: Let's see, she used to write letters back and I would write a letter to her, too. That was about the only way we could keep in contact, yeah.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.