<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Okay, so after you see the buses go by for the Seattle Japanese Americans going to Puyallup, then pretty soon they started moving people in Kent.

GN: Yeah.

TI: So describe what happened then. I mean, what did your dad or your family do with all your property and everything? What happened?

GN: They had to sell it for what they...

TI: So he sold the farm?

GN: Yeah, yeah. They were either leasing it or buying it, I don't know what they were doing by then. I think they were just leasing it then. So one morning they told us that the truck will be here at such and such a time, about nine o'clock in the morning, be ready to get on the bus, and they took us to, on a truck to Auburn, which is about five miles away, put us on the train.

TI: Now were you surprised they didn't send you to Puyallup? Because Puyallup wasn't that far away.

GN: It was full. So the Thomas and... one side of the river, we all went to Pinedale.

TI: Now, at this time, how large... who was in your family? Was it all twelve kids, or how many kids were still...

GN: Well, there was, Harry, Kaz was four years younger than me, was high school yet.

TI: But the older ones, like your older sisters and Fred, they...

GN: Yeah, Fred, me... oh, Sam just graduated that year, spring. So I was, my older sister and my older brother and myself were the only ones out of high school, all the rest of them were still in school.

TI: And was your older brother... so when they moved the family, was your older brother with the whole unit, too?

GN: Yeah.

TI: So it was a big group.

GN: Yes. We had one big unit on one end of the barrack, and another family, a smaller family was in between, and we had a unit on each end of the barrack.

TI: Okay. So you guys could yell across to each other over that one family. [Laughs] That poor family, caught in between the Nakagawas.

GN: [Laughs] Yeah.

TI: So describe your first impressions of Pinedale when you got there. What was that like?

GN: Hot and dusty and disgusted. I was so... I wasn't mad as discouraged with the way the American Constitution works, they can do these things. I was really mad enough that I wasn't going to do a single thing in camp. I was just going to sit around and let 'em feed me, but like I told you before, the first night in that mess hall, the young girls were waiting on tables, and it's 120 degrees and all the older women were bussing tables, and cooks sweating away, I said, "Oh, I can't sit around and let everybody, my own people work like heck just to keep me fed and stuff like that. I got to do something." So the next day I went to the administration and told them to give me something to do to help out. Guy said, "What can you do?" I said, "You know, I can probably make, work as a carpenter or something, 'cause I took shop in high school, I was pretty good at it." He said, "Well, we need benches and tables, how about making that?" And I said, "What are you gonna use?" No lumber or anything. He said, "Well, we'll find some pallet boards and whatever we can find, and that's when I started making benches and those tables, little short table, coffee table like stuff.

TI: But you're making it out of pallet boards? So just the really thin wood.

GN: And hard wood, second (grade) stuff, we'd saw it up and drill it and put screws and stuff, and make that kind of stuff. But I only stayed in camp... by Fourth of July I was already out.

TI: So not too long then, just two or three months.

GN: Oh, no, less than a month. By Fourth of July I was out in Utah.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2014 Densho. All Rights Reserved.