Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Mo Nishida Interview I
Narrator: Mo Nishida
Interviewer: Martha Nakagawa
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: November 29, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-nmo-01-0009

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MN: Well, let me ask you about your schooling at Granada, Amache. Where was your school located? Was it pretty far from your block?

Mo N: No. It was down toward the entrance as I recall, near the hospital. And, yeah, so from our block, from 11-K, we had the main north-south artery. Well, every block... the thing was set up in rows. So you had, I don't know, one to eleven or twelve or something like that. And it then was one way, rows, and then across like that was by alphabet, alphabetical order. So we lived at 11-K, and the block just to the east of us, or west of us, was 11-H. And there should have been a... if we were K, there should have been an L. There was only one L block, 9-L. So it went like that. So between each block, then there was a main thoroughfare going through, main through the camp. And as I recall, you just had to walk down towards the entrance, we were right on the edge, the far, the southern edge of the camp. There was only one block above us, 12-K and then we were 11-K, went down to, I don't know what the smallest numbers were, but down there. And we used to just walk down that street, and then we'd have to go left a little bit and then we'd be at school. So school was real easy, it was real easy then.

MN: And who were your teachers?

Mo N: What? Oh, our teachers were... yeah, if I recall, they were white and Japanese. I don't remember anything about the white teachers. We had a Japanese lady who was, we thought she was special. She was pretty and she was young and she was nice to us. Of course, when we had that get-together, the three of us, we used to talk about all the kind of mischief that we used to do to her, though. Yeah, yeah. One time we put a live snake in her desk, and another time we were hiding on top of the roof of the school throwing snowballs at her. [Laughs] We were having fun. I think nowadays they'd put your ass in jail for some of the stuff we did. We didn't go to school a lot during the summertime. That was reserved for going out in the desert, checking out what the semi were doing, rattlesnakes and the turtles and coyotes.

[Interruption]

MN: Let's go back to camp, and let me ask you, we were talking about school, and you mentioned you had this one Japanese American teacher. Now, when you, in your class, did you have any hakujin students?

Mo N: Yeah.

MN: Who were they?

Mo N: There were two that I remember. There probably were more. But one was the principal's kid, and I think another one was one of the camp superintendent's kid. So we had the camp administrative personnel's children going to school with us. So, yeah, they were, it would be interesting to hear their stories now, how they felt, because we hated them. They represented the power and they knew it. They lorded it over us every chance they got. So whenever we had an opportunity to fight back, that's what we did, we fought back. So they were getting picked on pretty regular. I mean, the story that, the three of us got together to talk about camp days. One scene that sticks out vividly in my mind is when after the draft started and people started getting drafted and shipped out, then we had heard that they had gone over to, I guess, North Africa was the, 100th Battalion, when they went to Italy, and it seemed like right after the curfew, the hell that was raised about the draft, the coffins started coming back. And the first batch of coffins that came back, there was a whole bunch of 'em. So they decided to have a regular, a real full military funeral for these soldiers that had come back. I think they call it a twenty-one gun salute.

And they sent this sucker out from Washington, this white boy, come out there, and they dismissed the school and told the instructor, "Let's all go out to the graveyard." And this fool sat up there and made this great talk about how "our boys died fighting for freedom and democracy." And yeah, I couldn't have been more than the second or third grade at the most. And me and the other two guys, we knew that was pure bullshit. So we were disgusted, and so we left and started walking away. Then when we looked up, we were following these two white boys. So, okay, let's see what they're up to. So we followed them, and we watched them set fire to the prairie out there. And we said, well, we'd better get the hell out of here. If they see us out here, for sure we'll get blamed for it. So we took off in another direction, out there playing and stuff like that. Next day, when we got back to school, then we hear that, "Oh, yeah, the two boys saw some Jap boys out there, Jap kids out there setting fire to the prairie," stuff like that. We said, "Bullshit, that was them." So then we decided that we were gonna confront them, and we had a good fight that day. Got into all kind of trouble behind that. But yeah, so it'd be interested to see what the kids... 'cause most of 'em were children of higher ups, people that were supposed to be lording it over us. We didn't like them at all.

MN: So when you had this confrontation, what was your punishment?

Mo N: Well, I don't know if it was exactly that punishment or not, 'cause I guess we were always getting into trouble, so bring our parents in. One of the things that they used to do to us was to send us down to a lower grade and make us feel ashamed. That's what they thought. But we used to just go down there and bully everybody in the lower grades. [Laughs] They never sent us to a higher grade, though. I never could figure out why they didn't do that. But they always sent us down to the lower grade. The teacher of the lower grade was, "Get them out of here. I don't want them here." [Laughs] I don't think, I don't have any real bad recollections about punishment in camp. If not, we'd just run out into the desert, deal with what comes up the following day when we went back to school.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.