<Begin Segment 14>

SY: So this, so you remember, then, that whole period in, at the assembly center in terms of your working, and was your mother working in the, at the time?

YM: No. No, she never worked. My sister-in-law didn't work, just the head of the house. My brother probably did. And my brother that's right above me, he was teaching. They had classes there, I guess. Some people graduated, I guess, while they were there.

SY: So you, yeah, you had to, you all had, tried to think of things to do, then.

YM: Right. But, like my mother when, I think -- no, I can't remember where she, no, this must've been in Gila. It wasn't Santa Anita. But they had things to do somehow. It's amazing, in, not Santa Anita so much, but later on, what they did with the camp. It's amazing. But Santa Anita, we had, one thing we had was entertainment. Over the weekend there was entertainment or a dance or a movie or whatever at the grandstand.

SY: And what kind of entertainment?

YM: Well, they had, there was one fellow who was a Hawaiian singer, and we had some of our local talents, and mainly some kind of music. Maybe they had a band or something like that.

SY: But it was all people within the camp.

YM: Yeah, right. Yes, all within the camp. And it's amazing how people get together and organize a group or something like that, but when you have certain talents I guess you seek other people.

SY: And they had, they had instruments? Or were they...

YM: Yeah, I'm sure they brought their instruments.

SY: They did bring their instruments.

YM: And then we'd have dances on this ramp, which was, like, inclining, kind of hard to dance on, but we enjoyed it.

SY: And people had records? They brought their own records to use for the dances?

YM: I guess so, probably. It amazes me that they could get up, figure out things like that so quickly while we're there.

SY: And your friends? Did they, did you manage to stay in touch with some of your friends?

YM: Yes. There was, I must've gone into an area where the Seinan people were because some of the friends from Seinan area were in that area, so I saw a lot of them.

SY: And sort of describe what Seinan area is.

YM: Seinan area is around Normandy and 36th.

SY: So it's the next area of Japanese that lived --

YM: Yeah, exactly. I don't, there may be more in the Seinan area than Uptown. I'm not sure. There's quite a, there was the Methodist church, this church was the --

SY: Centenary.

YM: -- center of that area.

SY: And so you knew some of those people when you were growing up?

YM: Yeah. Sometimes 'cause some of them will be in the same high school or something like that, so I knew some of them. And so when I, when we moved from one barrack to the other there was still some friends on that corner, 'cause it's a long walk up to the other end. Had one friend in, I had one friend in the horse stable.

SY: Just one friend?

YM: I had two friends, but this one friend was a girl and her mother, and they didn't stay there very long because they had another sister who was in Manzanar already. She was an RN and I guess she had volunteered, so the mother and the sister were going to join her up there. So she was one of my good friends and she left very early. She wasn't there more than a couple of weeks, I guess. They managed to transfer them out there.

SY: Do you remember talking to her about those stalls?

YM: Yeah, we, we went out to the stalls, and it was like, it's not enclosed all the way up. It's, I mean, you could hear the neighbors, in other words. And you could see they painted over chewed up wood.

SY: Fixed them up a little bit.

YM: It was pretty bad. So anybody who could move out of it... but see, these are only two people, and maybe the smaller families got them. I don't know. But they were definitely in there.

SY: And that was, I guess you don't, how do, how did they choose the people that went into the stalls, that was the question.

YM: Right. Maybe it's the size of the family or something. So the unfortunate ones.

SY: Right. But you your living conditions weren't terrible.

YM: No, no. It was bare, of course, and it was so temporary that we didn't, I don't think we put too much work into it like we did after in Gila.

SY: And the mattress, did you have regular mattresses?

YM: We had regular mattresses, yeah. You hear stories about stuffing straw, but that was not us.

SY: That was more in the horse stalls, you think?

YM: No, I think, like in maybe Manzanar, 'cause everything wasn't organized when they first, the first crew went to Manzanar, the volunteers.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.