<Begin Segment 23>

[Ed. Note: Due to technical difficulties, a portion of the interview is missing.]

MT: My brother was younger, my younger brother, would stay around the house more, I mean, around the room more, and so he was there. My sister would hang with her most of the time. She had friends, she was in a club and stuff like that, but most of the time she would hang around there. So in that sense, she was not as, wouldn't wander. 'Cause I was always known from when I was younger to break the rules first and get people used to that. And then my sister and brother broke the rule and it wasn't so bad anymore. [Laughs] You know, like curfew, night curfews and stuff like that. But she generally didn't do too much as far as I know. She stayed around home and she would scold me when I did something wrong. She had a lot of worries, lots of worries.

TI: And talk about those worries. Was it around your father and just trying to figure out where he was...

MT: Didn't know where he was, and what's going to happen to us. What was going to happen to us? Those were the kind of things that she was concerned about. Were we going to be pawns in the war? She thought about those kind of things and she was worried about those. And also the breakdown of the family, she was worried about that.

TI: And so did you see a shift in her, I mean, a definite change because of the experience?

MT: No, she was pretty good about that. She was pretty astute, and she would watch that she doesn't get my angry, there would be a clash. She would reprimand me when I don't do something, wrong, and I know I'm doing wrong. But in case of certain things, she'd be careful. And it was later, I'm thinking, I said, "Gee, whiz, she outsmarted me." [Laughs]

TI: So she'd know what your hot buttons were, so she'd kind of avoid them, but get you to do certain things.

MT: And she would use psychology.

TI: Interesting. Any other memories, stories about Santa Anita before we move on?

MT: Yeah, I was at the riots, I saw the riots. That was instituted, as far as I can see, by the civilian guards. They were having trouble. First of all, the whole thing was ill-planned, the whole assembly center was ill-planned. And they didn't have any baby food, they didn't have any dietary food for people who had... 'cause we were all eating the same thing. Babies can't eat... if you were an infant and having breast milk, you wouldn't have any problems. But now you're trying to eat food, then the mother would have to do kami kami, they have to masticate the food and then give it to the child, and a lot of them didn't want to do that, they wanted baby food and stuff. So they would ask the friends to bring in the baby food, they had to pay money, bring in the food. Or pretty soon, everybody started getting hotplates to cook, 'cause some of the food wasn't good, they want to have that. And so people on the outside, whether it be Japanese, or that haven't gone to camp yet, or their American friends, to have them bring things. We had a hotplate brought in. There was a Filipino guy that were our friend, Mr. Milo, and I give him a lot of credit. Of all things, Filipinos were really angry at Japan for attacking the Philippines and the atrocities committed and stuff, so they were really angry, and they would beat up Japanese if they caught 'em. Yet this man remained our friend. He would come to Santa Anita, to the Shintanis and us, and visit.

Oh, that's another interesting part of, deviation. What happened is the Shintanis were there in Central California, Zone 2, when they were told they had to go to camp, Poston, I believe. They had to go to Poston. They said, "We don't want to go to Poston," they want to join us. So they said, "Well, we're relatives and I want to go into Santa Anita," and he got permission to come into Santa Anita. Another way of skirting things. So they came into Santa Anita, but they got to go stay in the barracks, not in the stables. And he was a young Issei, so he knew a lot of the older Niseis. So he was involved with some things and so forth, and then it was time go to go relocation camp. We were told that because we came from Central Avenue, that our group is going to Rohwer. That's Arkansas. That's in the bayou, that's terrible. It's swamps and cottonmouths, a terrible place to go. 'Cause I knew where that was, and I said, "Oh, we don't want to go there." Well, Mr. Shintani came to our place, our room, and want to have a discussion, and I was part of that discussion. He said since he came in voluntarily, the people told him that he can pick any camp that he wanted to go to. And he said, "So I can pick a camp, then I can say, then you can say that you're my relative and we can go to the same camp. We can make arrangements from there," again, breaking, not going accordingly. Oh, great, where do you think we should go? We don't want to go to swamps, of course, and we don't want to go out to any of the Arizona camps, Poston or Gila, 'cause that's desert. That's a terrible place to be. Don't want to go to Heart Mountain, 'cause it's cold up there, it's terrible. The best place to go -- and also Delta in Utah is also desert area, south of the Salt Lake area. But the best place is Colorado. And I'd envisioned this Colorado, Rocky Mountains, big trees, trout streams, beautiful place to go. And it's not as hot, it's not as cold, it's a place to go, and it's not swampy. So we chose it. So they volunteered to go to Amache, and we followed along, said we were relatives and got in. Get to Amache, sagebrush, rattlesnakes, hot in the summer. 110 in the summer, and winter is usually 10 below. The first winter was 22 below. But Heart Mountain was 34 or 35 or so.

TI: Well, what's interesting to me is how you were so kind of analytical about it. I mean, here you had these choices, so looking at Arkansas versus Wyoming versus the desert, Arizona. Yeah, I guess just based on, in some cases, just your geographic knowledge of these different places.

MT: So-called, 'cause I didn't know we were going to go into... and the western edge of the Dust Bowl. Amache was the western edge of the Dust Bowl. And also it was area where a lot of the farmers had gone broke.

TI: Was Manzanar or Tule Lake a possibility also?

MT: Oh, yeah, you could go to Manzanar. But I knew what Manzanar looked like. Amache sounded to me, at that point, much better. Colorado, I think of those Rocky Mountains. I don't think about it as the western plains, I mean, eastern plains.

TI: And about how many people from Santa Anita went to Amache?

MT: About three thousand, little over three thousand. We were about, I think about forty-four percent, forty-five percent of the camp, fifty-five percent was from Merced Assembly Center. There was an interesting thing about that. I used to think, why did they take -- these were people from, most of the people from the Seinan, L.A. city, gardeners, produce workers, they were placed in Santa Anita. Then they had these farm people that were placed first before we were there, just weeks before they went into Amache. In fact, some, the first group had to go finish the barracks. They weren't even finished. We were the last camp to be built and we were the one different camp. We didn't have tarpaper walls. The walls, what they did was they put a foundation, regular foundation on, poured it, and on top of it put the framing, but no floors. What they did was to put brick, new bricks end to end without mortar on the, 'cause it was sandy soil, all on there end to end, filled it up and that was your floor. Then you had your wall and you had your roof. They had tarpaper on the... but the walls were made by two feet by four feet composition, course composition tongue in groove walls. First it was, they put a coating of tar on it, then they sprinkled light gravel, a beige gravel on the outside, in tongue in groove.

TI: So the construction was much, much better than the other...

MT: But you could kick it and it'd put a hole in it. It was about three quarter inch thick.

TI: But still, compared to some of the other just tarpaper with no insulation...

MT: But the problem was they had floors. We didn't have floors. The reason I say that is because this, the foundation isn't perfectly even, the wood isn't even, so there's a gap there, so when the wind blows -- we're on the western edge of the dustbowl -- when the wind, and we had wind blowing every night, not much, but when, and the air, the wind and the sand would sometimes come right through that. So we would, we stuffed all that area to keep it from coming in.

TI: It's still interesting to me that Amache was so different. I just, I kept thinking, my thought was that for the camps they just followed the basic blueprint. I mean, this is how, and they gave it to contractors and they just built it, and so this is, this is different.

MT: Our floor plan was exactly like Heart Mountain, just the same. We had an entryway, and go in the entryway then you went to two rooms. And we were a hundred twenty by twenty size and we had, there were sixteen foot wide then twenty-four, twenty, and sixteen, I think it was. That would come out to... no, no. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right, sixteen, sixteen, twenty and, and it was up to three people, then it was up to seven people, then up to five people. That's how it...

TI: But the floor plans were the same, but the materials used were different.

MT: Different, 'cause there were regular tarpaper barracks with wooden floors. Now also, we had drywalls between the rooms and our ceiling, we had a ceiling, so we were much nicer in that sense. Now, and they also then gave us Celotex. You know what Celotex is? That's a fibrous material, four by eight sheet, feet sheets that, much, it's much finer than the one they used, and it's just plain, so they gave it to us, so we would just cut it and fit it onto the walls where there so that we have that. And we had sliding windows.

TI: So why was Amache so different in terms of the --

MT: We were the last camp to be built. We're the last camp to build, the smallest camp, too. And so, and we, so it was different and yet it was nicer and wasn't as sturdy. Worried about that, 'cause when the, we had a wind storm one time, it popped open some of the walls, fell down. If you had a, if you had regular construction like camp with all the wood on it, it would not have happened.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.