Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Florence Ohmura Dobashi Interview
Narrator: Florence Ohmura Dobashi
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: San Francisco, California
Date: January 19, 2016
Densho ID: denshovh-dflorence-01-0017

<Begin Segment 17>

TI: Talk about school at Poston. What was that like?

FD: Well, the first year, school was held in, at the so-called "recreation halls" of each block, because they didn't have a central school building. So I don't know about elementary kids, I think they probably stayed in one room for the entire school day. But then for high school kids, they had classes in various recreation halls in different blocks. And so on a given day, depending on what your classes were and where they were, you might have to tramp all over the camp in order to attend classes.

TI: Well, that's interesting. So, because there wasn't a central school, like, I guess an example, mathematics or something, he would maybe have to go to a different block to attend there. So students from all different blocks would take their math course.

FD: Uh-huh. And then for social studies, you might have to go to another block, and for other classes you go to a different block. But anyway, it seemed like we were tramping all over the camp to attend school. While we were doing that, the adults were busy planning and building school buildings. And they built them out of adobe bricks, so I recall walking past the area where they were making adobe bricks and they would put them into wooden forms and laid them out to dry in the sun. So as I walked past it every day on the way to school, I would ask somebody, "What are you going to do with these and when?" And they said, "Oh, you're going to have a nice school building one of these days. And so by the second year, they had constructed a school building.

TI: And when you way the adults did this, were these the inmates?

FD: Yes, the inmates. They had to build, do all the labor themselves. And they got paid, I forgot how much, something like sixteen or eighteen dollars a months for doing this hard labor.

TI: But they would literally make the bricks and build a school?

FD: Yeah, and they made the bricks by digging a hole in the ground, and that hole in the ground eventually became so big that somebody had the bright idea to line it with concrete and make it into a swimming pool.

TI: Oh, so they built, I mean, the hole was to get the clay for the bricks, and then they made concrete swimming pools. So probably right next to the school then?

FD: Well, it's near the school.

TI: And what was the schooling like? I mean, who were the teachers for you?

FD: Well, some of them were inmates, that is, Japanese Americans who were still college students, maybe only freshman or sophomore college students. And there were a few Caucasian teachers who were probably more qualified. But most of the teachers, I think, were camp inmates.

TI: And here you were, you were a really good student in junior high school. What was the quality of the education for you? I mean, how did you feel about what you were learning in the camp school?

FD: I don't remember how I felt about it. It just seemed like I probably wasn't learning as much as I would have in our home schools, schools at home.

TI: Yeah, I want to go back to a story you told me earlier about your principal. So after you left Riverside and were at Poston, you were mentioning your principal sent you something.

FD: Yeah, he sent me my graduation certificate from junior high school because I was in the ninth grade.

TI: And what did that mean to you when you received your certificate?

FD: Oh, I was delighted. I thought, oh, this was so nice of him. And then I was even more appreciative because I remembered his handwriting, and it looked like his own handwriting.

TI: By any chance did you keep that? Do you still have it?

FD: Yeah, I still have it.

TI: I'd love to see that.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.