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TI: So Jim, we're going to get going again, so the second hour. And something you mentioned earlier and I said we'd get back to it was the closing of Tule Lake and how you were there to help close it up. So can you talk about... I mean, you talked a little bit about at some point working for the WRA and moving out of the camp and into the administration area. So why don't you pick it up there and kind of talk about what you did?

JY: Yeah. I moved from the camp, from the barracks. In the meantime, my brother and all wasn't home, I think they were already gone. And the, Rickets was the head engineer at the time, and he asked me, "Well, how about a job here to help close the camp up?" We had to close our records and so forth. And meantime, my father wrote and says, "Stay there as long as you can," because we had no place to stay at the time. It's just temporary quarters, a small place. So that way they can alleviate the space. Okay, so anyway, so I took the job. It didn't pay very much, and so different things, we're taking care of the construction part, I was going through different records and this and that. And I was talking about the water pipe that I was looking for. And in the meantime, I ran across this bill of lading. And one car, pipe the size I was looking for, it was shipped, they paid for it, and I remember there was only one pipe in the car. So there was one carload, one pipe is one carload, right? So one carload of pipe, so someone siphoned it off on the way there. That's why I didn't have that pipe. I was wondering why the pipes don't come. Because the WRA has the highest, the number two rating as far as material that we need immediately. We're allowed to get, the army is number one, and the WRA was number two. So we can get most anything we want, like tires and gas and oil, we worked to get all that supplies, because we were classified as high priority. And that's why I was able to get the pipe, you just send a requisition in. And in the meantime, somebody stole the whole carload of pipes. Things like that I found out through records how they siphoned a lot of stuff.

But I think that the funniest part of my job there when I, when everybody left on March 20th, a couple days later, says, "Hey, Jim," says, "we got a job for you." "Okay, whatever it is." "You have to go through every barrack, every room, every toilet, everything, wherever people is, got to check that there's no dead body. And as you go, open every barrack." I went through every barrack, looking into beds, shaking, getting a stick and shaking everything out. And then odd how people leave their things. Some people wash their dishes, stack them up nicely, because they were bringing, they had to go get the food elsewhere someplace, because they had to walk maybe four or five blocks to get the food because there's nobody there. So they shut this mess hall down and they opened one, another. So everybody started to go along there. And some people washed it, some people just leave the bed as is, some people just walk off. Just as they ate it, they just walk right off the table. I mean, you know, how different people kept the place clean and some people took everything they had. Nothing in the room, they took the furniture and all. Dishes and blankets, everything else was gone. And some places, the only thing they couldn't take was the cots and mattress. But other than that, because the WRA told them, says, "You could take whatever you want." The trucks would take, so everybody made boxes and this and that. And towards the end, they would look for me and say, "Hey, Jim, we need lumber. We need lumber, plywood. So I'd give 'em all the, whatever we had, scraps, we'd give 'em to them and they made boxes. They packed everything up, much as they can, so many people from Tule Lake brought home a lot of things.

But I think in '44, I think it was '44, late '44, WRA wanted to get everything out of their government warehouse, and so they were delivering everything that was in the, you had anything stored in the government warehouse, we'll come to barracks in Tule Lake. And I know one guy had a store someplace, I don't know where, and so he had a lot of chinaware. He just left them because useless, couldn't sell it. And a lot of Imari ware, real fancy chinaware. And I had tons of that stuff come in. Meantime, he sold it for a nickel, a penny, a dollar or whatever it is, whatever he can get out of it. And one of my trips up there, I went to the dumps, and I seen this fine chinaware, a friend of mine found a sake cup, perfect shape, real nice. We asked the collector, said it's worth a fortune. In the meantime, the fairgrounds, they had a museum, and they show, this kind of china is Imari ware. We ate off of Imari ware china for mess hall, this and that. [Laughs] Says, "Hell, no. We ate those big old army dishes." Trying to explain to them, we can't tell the whole story to everybody. But I told that caretaker of that museum how that came about.

TI: And that was just leftover, I mean, left?

JY: It was just left behind. And then what was left behind, they just took it to the dumps. And there's one picture I'll show you, there's, it has a koi nobori, the carp, Boy's Day carp, the big carps flying all over Tule Lake area because they had 'em, they came into it, so got 'em for nothing, they just, well, put 'em up there. So you see one picture with all the kois flying around. Things like that, knowing, but anyway, so the meantime, this guy named Hathaway, I forgot his first name. Anyway, he worked for the Park Service. And he was kind of an archaeologist in a way and Park Service, and he says, "You know, the Japanese people are very meticulous." Says, "All the stuff that, china dishes and so forth, is nice and straight row. The barracks are all gone now, right? And kind of made me chuckle to myself. Says, "You know what happened?" Says, "The farmers didn't want the chinaware, so they just threw 'em out of the door. So the barracks are in a straight row, right?" So everything got thrown out. It just falls in a straight line. And he says, "Yeah, I guess so." But little things like that, I know, that happened. It's very interesting because most of the guys, I helped to clear up the records and this and that, and they're all different finagling. But I made more boxes and more crates for the staff to leave the camp site. So finally, I did that for about two or three months, they put a stop to that. The director Best says, "No more favoritism."

TI: You mean making boxes for...

JY: Boxes for the staff to leave. They're all leaving, right? There was about a couple hundred left behind. There's a picture of us, last two or three hundred that was there, I'm in the picture but there was about five or six of us Japanese stayed behind and helped close the records.

TI: So at this point, everyone's out...

JY: Everybody's out. The barracks are empty, and there's this one picture of the camp, overall picture, and then they said, "This is what the camp looked like?" I said, "No, that's after the camp closed." You look in the stockade, you could see all the trucks and different vehicles parked inside the stockade because the stockade was the only place that had fence clean around it. Things like that I can notice because knowing, I had a part in doing it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.