<Begin Segment 27>

TI: So Morgan, we're gonna start again. Earlier you were talking about your father in Tule Lake, he was the boiler room man and he would make swords there, and so I think Barbara and I were really interested in those swords and you said you actually had the swords here, so let's talk about the swords. You have them next to you.

MY: Yes, I have the swords right here.

TI: Can you, can you show the swords first? I just want to look at them. I haven't seen them yet, other than...

MY: Well, the background is, in order to make a sword, all you need is a hammer and the tongs to hold the heated piece of metal, and the piece of metal could be any piece of metal, whether... and the most important thing is the carbon content of a metal. These things you've got to know, and I learned all these things from one of the foremost swordmakers in Japan. A friend of mine and I met this swordmaker in Japan some twenty, thirty years ago who came to the United States, and subsequently we've been good friends, and he knew my brother Al because my brother Al was a sword appraiser in Japan and they spent a lot of time together, including vacations together. Anyway, getting back to making a sword, as I say, you need heat, fire, that is, not plain heat, fire where you could put the piece of steel into the fire. You're gonna need something to hold the steel because you can't hold the steel, tongs, and you need a hammer, something to, piece of metal down below in which you could put, place the metal and beat the heated sword until you have the control of the carbon content of the metal. And these are knowledge which comes out of looking at that steel. Well, only place you can do that in the camp is the boiler room, where you have to keep the boilers going. In order to keep the boilers going you shovel coal. Okay, so for whatever reason, my father had this job. I think he consciously knew what he was getting, and getting a piece of metal is no big deal because there's a motor pool, and then all you need is somebody to get a piece of metal from them, which he did. So he got a job tending the boiler room, putting coal into the fire, and that's how he made his swords. As I said, the process of making a sword is heating the flat piece of metal, beating it in such a way that you could get the shape of a sword.

[Shows a sword] And here you get a fairly rough -- you never touch a blade with a finger -- so that is a basic shape of a sword, and it is not in any way finished, because if you look at it you can see all the mark, hammer marks. All those black spots are hammer marks. And this is basically done with a flat piece of iron, which is, tire spring is about that big, wide. It could be any length, and you could cut any steel by heating it and just bending it, and so this was done in such a way, and then you started hammering it so you get this shape. This is the cutting edge, and this is the hasp end, and then you notice there's a, this is where the peg is placed between the handle and the blade, and then there's the name of the maker, my father's name.

TI: So he would label his, his...

MY: Yes, it's carved into the middle, like any Japanese sword, not every sword, but ninety-odd percent will have a signature. So that is the, roughly the shape of a sword before it's polished in any way.

TI: How did you come into possession of this, 'cause you mentioned you didn't really know very much during the camp that your dad was doing this?

MY: Well, when he left camp he just left it behind, because Al and I were still there. No, excuse me, no, he had this when he came out with him. No, this was on Washington Street when he left for Japan, because in Japan this is worthless. It's a piece of metal. That's all it is.

TI: And so the first time you saw that was when? When did you first see this sword?

MY: Nineteen-forty, fifty, oh, about, my parents retired in '56, so it's about plus or minus that period where we were cleaning up Washington Street after they left. And this is a scabbard roughly made by my father with a redwood piece of lumber which he found in camp. This is all found in camp. So that is the basic sword.

[Shows a different sword] And then this is finer shaped from the... and then, I told you about the hole in the, this is the peg that holds the handle. And then when you handle a sword the blade is always up so that the sword rests on the bottom, and so here you have more or less the finished blade.

TI: Wow, and he did that in camp? It's heavy. It's...

MY: It's a piece of steel. I did the finishing job. It's still not completely finished.

TI: Did your father ever tell you any stories about these swords?

MY: No.

TI: Did, he just left them behind?

MY: He never told me anything about making these.

TI: Did your father, do you know if your father did this with anyone else? Were there other --

MY: What?

TI: -- other people doing similar things?

MY: Don't touch the blade.

TI: Okay.

MY: I seen one, two other swords made in camp, in the whole of hundred twenty thousand people. [Addressing BT] Other questions, ma'am? You're the one that's entranced with this.

BT: Right. Well, what I'm puzzled about is, is about how he might've gotten them out of camp without --

MY: Got this out of camp?

BT: Well, how did they survive without the military police finding them?

MY: By the time we were leaving camp nobody cared what we had. Nobody looked at what was in our baggage.

BT: Do you have any idea when he was making them?

MY: Sometime between 1944 and '45 when he left camp.

BT: Not earlier?

MY: Well, we went into Tule '44.

BT: '43.

MY: '43? I'm trying to remember when he was a boilerman, and all I could think was '44, '45.

BT: Toward the end.

MY: What?

BT: Toward the end?

MY: Not necessarily toward the end, but I don't remember him doing this after stockade. And it was really, I would say, no big deal for him to be a boiler man, and it was no big deal for somebody to be busy doing something in the boiler room.

BT: I think the guards would disagree with that. [Laughs]

MY: I don't think some of the guards would've. They really didn't care what we were doing.

TI: Well, what's interesting to me was if you were trying to hide it, or in fact they did, you wouldn't put your name on the blade. I mean, he, like a craftsman who's very proud of this and actually wrote his name on these blades.

MY: [Shows a knife] That's what my father did, too, put decorations on the blade.

TI: Oh yeah. He's, looks like he had a lot of time.

MY: Hmm?

TI: Your father had lots of time to, to do these things.

MY: We had lots of time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, twelve months a year, and for four years. Can you imagine that much time in your life?

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.