<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Okay. So you get through 1942, you're there, so 1943, is it the same kind of work?

GN: We stayed in the same place. See, and the very first night, we were, the Japanese were put on the swing shift. And the day crew, they stayed there to see who's going to take over the swing shift and they saw a bunch of little guys, they're all hundred pound bags of sugar. And we were expected to put six bags on a hand truck and truck it to the, out of the boxcars into the warehouse, and load them back up and send it out. And they looked at us guys and I heard one guy tell the other, his friend, that, "They won't be here in the morning." In fact, come spring, they got rid of the white guys and kept us on full time.

TI: Because you guys were better workers than they were?

GN: Better workers, and without any complaints.

TI: Now, did the sugar company start recruiting more Japanese from the camps?

GN: Just one crew.

TI: You mean one more crew than you or just your crew?

GN: Just our crew.

TI: Oh, so even though you were such good workers, they didn't try to get more Japanese?

GN: Well, that's all the work there was, just enough to keep you going all year round.

TI: So then they promoted you from the swing shift to the day shift?

GN: Day shift, yeah.

TI: Good.

GN: And they took good care of us. But one incident, at the end of the day, you only have so many orders a day. The foremen made sure they stood around there and watched us do it, and towards the end, they give us a slip. We'd figure out how many needed to be loaded on the thing on such and such a car, we'd make out the bill of labels and tack it up and lock it up and put a tag on it, and just give him the slip. And he'd leave us completely alone. But at first they wouldn't let us go home when there was nothing to do. And they wanted us to... of course, we'd clean up completely, and the warehouse was like a living room, clean. And we said, "What can we do for another hour?" And they said, "Get in the back and hide. Make yourselves scarce." "We can't do that. We're gonna go home." Pretty soon we'd get the orders done for the day, and when we got through, we'd clean it all up and go home, and pay us for eight hours. But god, at first, it was terrible. That's the way they used to treat the white guys.

TI: Because first they'd have a supervisor just watch everything.

GN: Watched everything, yeah.

TI: And then probably they were slower than you or whatever.

GN: Yeah, yeah.

TI: And then, now, you guys would do everything, and get finished early, and they'd...

GN: Talk about literally wearing your fingers to the bone. They didn't have good rubberized gloves and stuff in those days. And when you're working with burlap bags and stuff like that, gee, you start wearing your fingers, we wouldn't have any fingerprints left.

TI: Wow, so hard work.

GN: Yeah, it was hard work, but gee, we were all just, by the time we got drafted into the army, it was just like barbell, man.

TI: So let's just... you mean really strong?

GN: Yeah, oh yeah. We got to a point where instead of... hakujin guys were big and tall, you know, so they can tip that hand truck and stuff like that. We figured out that if we put an extra bag on top, seven, it'd balance better. You can rake it easier. Then we started trucking it seven instead of six.

TI: That's good. Because yeah, again, it's just like, yeah, the balance is such that you...

GN: Yeah, we get a balance, you can wheel 'em all over.

TI: Although it's kind of like a lot of momentum, you had to be more careful around that much weight.

GN: Yeah. But little guys like us guys, trucking around seven hundred pounds, you know.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2014 Densho. All Rights Reserved.