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MN: Now, let's see. In September you started the eighth grade in Poston. Where were the classes being held in?

CO: Well, in these rec barracks that they had. Every block had one barrack that was empty, and for use for any purposes, I guess. Well, they used them for classrooms, so that's what it was like. And bare, I don't recall... we had a white teacher, though. So they had recruited white teachers. And that particular teacher I really don't remember. But the later ones I do remember, some of them.

MN: Now, when you went into the ninth grade, did the format change?

CO: Yeah, the format changed. And so there, we went from class to class, so they were kind of separated out as to what classes they were. That meant tramping all across the camp, because they were in different blocks. So we did a lot of walking from class to class. And we had a little junior high school newspaper called Desert Daze, D-A-Z-E, and I don't know if I edited it. I think I did for a while. But I wrote for it, certainly.

MN: How would you compare the education you were getting at Oceanside to the education you were getting in camp?

CO: I would say that in camp it was very hit and miss. I mean, some teachers were very conscientious. There were Nisei who were teaching who were clearly not qualified to teach. But that wasn't their fault, they just got recruited because they had been college students or something and they had this great shortage. So they obviously had no experience, and so they couldn't control the classes. That's my main memory, that the boys were just so out of hand that... you know, like we couldn't even hear the teacher sometimes because there would just be such noise going on. This was very "un-Japanese," but I don't know. Structure was breaking down, I would say. And I don't know, I think the boys really kind of got out of hand in camp, a lot of 'em. But anyway, they tried.

MN: Now, you know, some people might say, "Well, you're in this camp, there's no future for Japanese Americans, so why study?" But you kept up your studies.

CO: Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that was so built into me that I couldn't think of otherwise. I wasn't the only one. There were lots of kids who were conscientiously working away on their studies. And imagine, we had like Latin class in camp, so studied something like the Latin. Drill, Amo, Amas, Amat, they still stick in my mind, 'cause we'd drill all that stuff. And girls generally were pretty good students. So yeah, between the organized social life and school, most of the girls were pretty well-occupied. Their time was occupied.

MN: Now, you were twelve years old when you went into camp. Had you started your menstrual cycle yet?

CO: No, not at that age. But around twelve and a half, yeah. And my mother, the big prude, had never even mentioned any of this. And so once it started and I didn't know what it was or anything, and she says, "Oh, you're now suffering from the women's sickness," like it was some kind of illness to be endured or something like that, yeah. So a very negative feeling about this, "What is this? Why do we have to put up with this?" And other than that, there was no direct sexual information from my mother, 'cause she was a very retiring, prudish lady. And so what I picked up was with my peer group, pretty much. And my mother was, she didn't want us to grow up too fast. And like she did not want us to wear makeup or get things like brassieres. Things like that, she just did not encourage any of that stuff. And I was not a feminine kid, so I didn't really care that much. But boy, a lot of the other girls sure did, and they were curling their hair and clothes and lipstick and makeup and boys and everything else. But I was not inclined to get into that kind of stuff. So I was different. [Laughs]

MN: But you're starting your period in camp, which is a very public place.

CO: Yeah, right. It was very uncomfortable, I think, for all of us, because of the open latrines. And embarrassing, here we are, we all are pretending that this kind of thing is just not happening. You never talk about it or anything, or at least I didn't. My other girlfriends, a lot of them, they also were unprepared because they didn't know about it. But we did have sanitary pads, and I guess the canteens were selling it, or they ordered them through Sears-Roebuck or something. But we had things like that. Again, I guess there were some families that had some savings, and then with the meager pay, I guess they bought these necessities and all that. I don't remember being deprived of these necessities, but maybe some families were. I imagine they were, I don't know. Like my mother took up sewing classes, so she made up dresses and things for us. So we had decent clothing.

MN: Did you have any accidents when you got your period?

CO: Oh, I must have. I probably repressed all of that because it was so disgusting. [Laughs] I mean, just for being female, I felt like, "What a punishment." So I must have. But I don't know, we all coped somehow. I guess we probably ran home or something and changed clothes or whatever we needed to do, yeah. All these kind of girly activities.

MN: Well, let me ask you a different line of questioning now. In camp, you heard for the first time the eta class.

CO: Yeah, yeah. That was new to me, right. And you know, the camps were just huge rumor factories, man. So I think the part of the isolation ended up everybody minding everybody's business. That everybody knew what everybody else was doing or whatever, and so there would be gossip about everybody and everything all the time. I had not experienced that kind of situation, and I didn't like it. I don't know how come we didn't grow up in that kind of situation, but somehow, once we got into camp, there was this tremendous backbiting going on, people always criticizing other people. So this whole question of some people being of the eta class, the rumors would be whispered. And so you were told to avoid these people, which struck me as unfair somehow. They looked like everybody else, and I couldn't understand this classification of eta. And my family had never talked about it, and I don't think I went and asked my parents what they were or anything like that, I don't recall. But it's a lot of this old Japanese stuff coming out when we were all -- in fact, it was the first time that many of us had lived in a community that was all other Japanese. So I think that came as a big shock, too, at the beginning. The only whites who were around were the administrators and maybe a few schoolteachers. And we didn't see the administrators because they lived in a different part of the camp or anything. So it was pretty much a total Nikkei society, ten thousand of us. It took getting used to, with all this sorting out of whose class structure or kenjinkai, where you came from and where your family came from and all that sorting out went on in the camps.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.