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SY: And do you remember your thoughts when you first arrived?

HK: Yeah, we actually had a... I was in Block 12 I remember the Block 12 there was a Barrack 5 and, quote, they called them "Apartment" C and D. We have a little larger family so they gave us two rooms. My brother had left Tanforan to go to Topaz before it was fully completed... he volunteered to do that to help with some of the construction and some of the things they were doing there to prepare for the arrival of most of the people. So since he arrived early as a volunteer to help out, he had the choice of more desirable locations for where we would be housed. So he picked Block 12 which is a fairly central location, and we were right next to Block 19 which happened to be the canteen and the dry goods store. So it was very convenient in terms of our going to buy a few things that were available to us. So we had a very nice location and fortunately my brother was able to do that because he went earlier.

SY: Interesting.

HK: I do remember very clearly the... we're talking about the desert... very dusty like five or six inches of dust I thought, this was unbelievable, we're going to live here for a while? And I thought this is not a very hospitable place. Anyway, but we did manage to survive and here again we turned the desert into varied gardens and it's amazing what they did. We built an ice skating rink, and for kids it was fun in its own way because we didn't realize the full impact of it all until later. But as kids, we had a lot of kids to play with, we didn't have any... we didn't have to go out to the farm to work or the nursery or whatever so in that sense it was kind of a fun activity. But here again, without fully realizing the other things that were happening on the issue of internment.

SY: And do you remember any kind of reaction from your parents?

HK: I think again, like a lot of Issei and Japanese families, this whole notion we talked quite a bit about gaman and shigata ga nai, I think that helped us survive that whole experience. And I think those were very evident during those days it was just like what can we do? There's nothing much, we can't fight this, we don't have any leverage, so we just had to kind of go along and try and make the best of it. This is gaman thing and shigata ga nai, this can't be helped, this is the way it is, we have to make the best of a bad situation. And I think that those factors did help us to survive the ordeal.

SY: And your father was he given a job?

HK: Yes, my father was a carpenter. He was fairly handy because on the farm you do things which you have to do. So he was a carpenter and as I remember they worked... I think their salaries were like sixteen dollars for a common laborer and because nineteen dollars if you were doing more professional work like a dentist or a doctor or whatever. My father was a common laborer, was getting paid sixteen dollars a month. And then we were big on the Sears Roebuck catalog and we were able to order some things... not a lot, but here it was kind of fun to thumb through the Sears Roebuck catalog and say well, yeah it would be nice to have that. We didn't have very much money but we ordered a few things, so that was kind of nice.

SY: And your mother, was she working at all?

HK: My mother worked in the mess hall as we called it, every block had a dining area which we called the mess hall, and she worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen. So she did the dishes and the pots and the pans, but what's nice about that is she made some very good friends with other dishwashers, they were all women. And they became real buddies and even when they came back to California they stayed in contact. So curiously enough through this dishwashing work, they bonded and they became very good friends.

SY: So all of your siblings were with you at the time?

HK: My oldest sister Shizu, her husband was in the army.

SY: Oh, so she had married.

HK: So she... was she married? Just before the war, yes. So he was sent to Camp Grant in Illinois and she was able to join him so she moved to the town near the camp, Camp Grant, and the town was called Rockford, Rockford, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. So she never went to camp because she went to be with her husband who was in the army. But all the rest of us were in camp for a period of time.

SY: So your oldest brother must have been working as well then?

HK: Yes, he was in camp. I'm not quite sure what he did but he left fairly early. They asked for volunteers to help in largely sugar beets so they went up to Idaho and some of those states in that area to provide the labor for farm workers and again largely for sugar beet crops. So he would go with several men, Japanese men, and served as kind of like migrant workers and provided the labor for the crops.

SY: Was he eligible for the draft when it started?

HK: He was getting close to being eligible for the draft. Eventually he was drafted.

SY: He was drafted.

HK: But it was later, so he didn't go with the 442nd to Europe. He was with MIS, Military Intelligence Service, so he took training in the Japanese language at Fort Snelling in Minnesota like a lot of other Japanese American men, Nisei men. And eventually he was sent to Japan in intelligence work with MIS.

SY: I see.

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