Densho Digital Archive - Richard E. Yamashiro Interview (denshovh-yrichard

<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Okay, so let's continue with your story. So after the shootings at Manzanar, this was at the end of 1942, at the beginning of '43 they started having people fill out what a lot of people call the "loyalty questionnaire," the leave clearance form. Do you remember that?

RY: I remember that but I was too young. I wasn't involved in filling any of that out. And my sister had to fill it out and my parents did, but they just ignored me, I was too young, and I'm glad I didn't have to do that because I thought it was kind of stupid myself. But as a kid, no, you know.

TI: And so what did your family do? I mean, how did they answer the form?

RY: I think, I'm not positive, but I think they answered "no-no," that's why that was the first step to going to Tule Lake, to the segregation camp. And that was the very first step to going to Japan. And like I said, my father said that he wanted to go back to his own country where this would never happen to him again. And so I'm pretty sure they must have been "no-nos" because otherwise we wouldn't have gone to Tule. And that's when they started segregating the camp from the people that said "no-no" which they figured were "disloyal" people and the other ones, they would get ready to go relocate outside.

TI: And so segregate within Manzanar too, they were doing that or just at Tule?

RY: No, they would segregate us into Tule Lake because Tule Lake was, at that time it was known as a segregation center and it was huge. Tule Lake was a huge camp, I think it was probably one of the hugest ones.

TI: Now when you found out that you were going to be moved from Manzanar to Tule Lake segregation camp, how did you feel about that?

RY: Well, like I said, being a kid, it just didn't really bother me that much. But I know that when I first went to... when we went to Tule Lake, it was a weird feeling because the people in Tule Lake knew all these people coming from other camps where the "no-nos" and all that. So that the people that were there prior to all these other people moving in, didn't like us. And I'll tell you a funny story, the first day I went to school is in algebra class and I sat next to this kid, and just out of conversation he says, "Where'd you come from?" I said, "Manzanar." Well, he didn't talk to me the rest of the time 'cause he didn't like people from Manzanar. And the funny thing of it was he was a Monterey boy and when I went to Monterey, I married a Monterey girl and I got to know all these people from Monterey and I happened to run into him and I said, "Fujio, do you remember the time when I went to the algebra class and you asked me what camp I was from and I told you I was from Manzanar and you never talked to me after that?" And he kind of laughed it off but I thought that was ironic.

TI: Now, so he was at Tule but his family "yes-yes"?

RY: Yeah, I'm pretty sure because they went back to Monterey, yeah. Like I said, the people in Tule didn't really like us coming over there and the camp got pretty hard then, too, you know. It was a lot of agitators.

TI: And so just sort of in general, what was the difference between Manzanar and Tule Lake? How would you compare the two?

RY: Tule Lake had double fencing. They had a barricade about twelve feet away from the barbed wire fence and that was like no man's land. You couldn't go into that restricted area.