<Begin Segment 19>

MN: Now yourself, you're getting older, did you start going to the dances at Topaz?

KI: Uh-huh, yeah, we had school dances and we had block parties where we had dances so that's when I first started to learn how to dance.

MN: What kind of dances?

KI: Jitterbugging and the regular, just the social, I guess we called them social dances. we didn't do things like the rumba and that kind of stuff or the cha cha chas and that kind of stuff. It was mainly jitterbugging and then the slow dancing.

MN: Lot of Glenn Miller.

KI: Yeah.

MN: Did the boys come in the zoot suits and the duck tails?

KI: There were few guys like that but generally no.

MN: So in Topaz how much were you exposed to the Japanese culture and the sports traditions? And I'm going to name a few things like flower arranging and tea ceremony, did you participate in any of those?

KI: I didn't, but then like cultural things like you said the Bon Odori and the... I remember going and watching the sumo, they did have a sumo tournaments.

MN: How about mochizuki?

KI: If they had it I never went.

MN: Do you think if you had lived in Berkeley you would have been exposed to a lot of these cultural things?

KI: I think so. I think as I got older I think I probably would have made more friends with Japanese people and did more.

MN: Now when you were at Topaz and also at Tanforan, who did you eat your meals with?

KI: My friends. It started out with probably family and I think most people did because, well, of course the first day you always wondered who's living in your block, you know. And then you find out whose living there and then you make friends with or maybe it is your old friends from before. But my question to myself, much, much later again, is my mother was a waitress in our mess hall, my father worked in the kitchen, who was taking care of this little two year old sister that I had? I wasn't doing it. [Laughs] So it's a real mystery. I can't ask her because she's gone. I can't ask anybody 'cause they're all gone. It's just seems like I led such a carefree, non-responsible, non-accountable life. And I sort of feel bad about it but I didn't in those days. 'Cause none of my girlfriends, we were all doing the same thing.

MN: But do you think these eating arrangements affected your family life?

KI: The camp life?

MN: The eating arrangements and camp life in general?

KI: I don't think it did. I don't think it did. It might have and I just didn't see it.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.