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TI: So this is a good segue now to talk about, I want to ask about your experiences at Santa Anita, and in the previous interview you had described how in some ways your mother wanted to go to Santa Anita and so you use an address that would put you in an area that would be sent to Santa Anita.

MT: That's correct.

TI: And that's, that's kind of where we left it at the last interview, so why don't we pick it up from there in terms of the journey from Los Angeles to Santa Anita, and what was that like?

MT: This was Central Avenue in south central L.A. It was a Japanese boarding house and we had to go where they were gonna pick up from that area. And we boarded a bus, the area that was chosen, we knew where it was, and we boarded a bus and we went to Santa Anita. And as we entered Santa Anita, of course, the gates opened and we went inside, and I could see the barbed wire, see the guard towers, and we went inside. All this time the propaganda was, "We are putting you into these camps to protect you from the American public who are so upset about Japan bombing Pearl Harbor," and so that was a rationale that they had to use with us. I didn't believe it. I had two kinds, I did have, did know some news stories about some Japanese being beaten up and I think somebody even got killed from some people, and there were people that were upset with the Japanese because their homeland was invaded or things like that, and they would, and they were picking on some Japanese kids. I knew that was happening, but I know that when I went to school my friends were still friends, my friends. They didn't take me as part of Japan, so I knew that not everybody felt that way, and even at that thirteen years of age I felt that, that if you reasoned with people, explained to them that they would have, they would, they had some intelligence, they would understand. So when they said it was for our purpose and went into camp, went into Santa Anita, I could see the barbed wire fence. I could see the guard towers, and I noticed the guard towers had MPs in them with guns pointing at us, inside, not outside. That didn't mesh with protecting us. I realized then they were not protecting us but to keep us incarcerated.

TI: And how about the people around you? What was the mood, the feeling as you, as you recognized this?

MT: Well, I think people, I think more people were curious, wondering what's gonna happen to us. There was some fear of, are they going to, you know, put us together and kill us? There were some Isseis who felt that may happen and kind of quietly, but I didn't think that was gonna happen. I just couldn't believe American would do that. And I felt very more, mostly curious. What are they gonna do to us? And then we got out there and they gave us our number, our tag, 12803, still remember that, and that's our family number which we had all through camp, and then we went to, then they would give us assignment and we found we were assigned to the horse stables. And in reality that was the worst place you could go, because in the stables -- and by the way, my address was 12-A-20, was Stable 12A, I'm sorry, I guess in Stall 20, 12-A-20 was our... and what it was was they had taken the stable and they put walls across. As you, if you think of stables, they have Dutch doors, the two part doors with the horse sticks his head out and things. Well, they opened the, I'm sorry, it opens inward. It opened inward and then they put a wall, about equivalent the size of the stall, out to the edge of the overhang over the stall. So now you had two rooms and that was your room, and you're supposed to have up to five people in that.

TI: At this point, I mean, your family was size of five?

MT: Four of us.

TI: Four of you, okay.

MT: But also my cousin and her mother -- my uncle had died 1940. He was the one that owned the fishing boat and called my father, sponsored my father in the United States. He died 1940, but his, but his wife, my aunt, and her daughter, who was at the time, let's see, she must've been twenty-one, twenty at the time. She's twenty at the time. They were, they were assigned to a barrack with some two strangers 'cause you couldn't have two people in a room. So they were with this elderly Issei couple and my cousin and her mother, and my cousin said, "I don't want to stay with strangers," and she moved in with us. So we ended up with six of us and were, maximum was supposed to be five, so we were bed to bed in that room. [Coughs] Excuse me. And so it was a, the room was, the stable inside, they put a thin sheet of asphalt over the dirt so that you wouldn't be directly on the dirt, and then they whitewashed the walls, but they didn't care about what they whitewashed because horse hairs were stuck on there and different things and they just painted right over it, just one coat of paint, I'm sure. The other thing was the walls went up about, I would say maybe fifteen feet, ten feet, I'm not sure exactly, about ten feet probably, and then the roof of the whole stable, one stable, is pitched roof like this and then cut in half and then one stall face this way and opposite way. But when you went up ten feet, then the ceiling from there was open, didn't have any wall, just open, so what happened is that at evenings, we found out, is that, even the daytime, you could hear people talking. There was no insulation or no way of preventing any sound from traveling from one place to another. And so you could hear babies crying, people fighting, you could hear all this, and at nighttime you could hear people snoring, and so it was, it was not very private in this place.

Now, that was bad enough. Was worse in the summertime. We went in in May. About May 4th is when I went in. We were kind of late; compared to some of the people in April we were late. And some of us came in, some people came in after us. In fact, I think people from Mountain View came after us. Anyway, the problem was when it got hot. The asphalt started getting soft, and the cots would sink into the asphalt and the smell would come up and so stench was in the place. And so what some of us did, some who had a little more freedom -- we had a lot of freedom, actually, as teenagers -- what we did was, what I would do is in the morning I would go have breakfast at the mess hall, I would come back and get all the things I needed for the day. Now, toilet paper was rationed, so I had to take enough toilet paper just in case I have to go to the bathroom and took that, and then I would take off. I would stay all day with my friends and we would play sports or we would go to school or we would go to Boy Scouts, and we would do anything or, for thirteen, a friend of mine, Bob Asamoto and I, we would wander all over Santa Anita meeting girls. [Laughs] Even at thirteen.

TI: Now, during that time, especially when it got hot and the stench would come up, would anyone stay in the barracks, or pretty much everyone would kind of take off?

MT: Most people would, they created benches and stuff. They would leave, go outside. And some people, I'm sure some people stayed inside, but as time goes anything you can get used to, anyway. But so a lot of the Issei men had benches. They would sit out there, they would play shogi or they would play go or something outside. And others would just wander around, just walk around.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.