<Begin Segment 6>

PW: So you said that your father was released from Missoula kind of early and was able to join them at Tanforan, is that correct?

HS: Yes, he came back... he never went to Tanforan, he went straight to Missoula, but he returned to Tanforan.

PW: And then from Tanforan, was your family moved to a permanent concentration camp?

HS: To Topaz, Topaz in Utah.

PW: Do you remember anything specific they told you about Topaz?

HS: I went to Topaz just before I was sent overseas, so that was the only visit I had. But I was in the service. I wrote to many schools because I couldn't afford Grinnell, Grinnell was very good to me, they offered me work scholarships, and that's how I had enough money to use for my personal needs. But it was during that summer after my first year I did work on detasseling corn on the farms, that's what they do, is to make hybrid corns, you had to pull out the tassels, which were the male sperms. It was quite high, tall, the cornstalks were somewhere around six to eight feet. And fortunately, the sociology professor, I had not taken his course, was a man named Bouma, was very kind. And it is said that his aunt was Katharine Hepburn. Anyway, some tassels I couldn't reach, he would reach them and would drop them on the floor. I learned about detasseling, and then after the first year, the first summer, that was what I was doing. But by that time, it was 1943, I went to the University of Nebraska because Yozo, my brother, had entered Nebraska, and I was able to join him at a co-op. The co-op was almost all Japanese because there weren't many students. And I got a job which was fairly easy, at the Nebraska Hotel, and that was their big hotel. I used to polish the floors and all that. But then I worked on icing, refrigerated cars, and that was hard work, and I was too small for it. So the Niseis who were there, and there were lots of students going to Nebraska because the president was very generous and understanding. And I look at it now and I said, was it because he was understanding, or was it because they needed students? And Nebraska did not have a student military service, it was called ASTP. ASTP, Army Specialized Training Program, and Navy B-12, if you're a college student attending college, at the time you were able to go to these services while you were in the service. I had a friend, Joe Starr, very close, he was in the ASTP at whatever college he was. But he, as soon as the last push by the Germans were made, all of them were taken. They had to go into combat with those training.

I'm sorry I'm jumping. The cars, the train cars were refrigerated by ice, and the ice were picked up during the wintertime on the rivers, they were cut and put into these sheds, and they were brought up by elevators. And fortunately there were a few, I was five-foot-two, I wasn't very big. So they would help, and they were strong and they were farm boys, they could put ice up. And that paid fifty cents an hour, so it was better, but Nebraska could get hot in the summertime. Well, then because... I think I applied to about seven colleges, Chicago, among which was Nebraska. Nebraska, I got accepted to four schools. Nebraska, Michigan accepted me, they wouldn't believe me, I told them I was not in camp ever. And they said they could accept me because they had an ASTP program and they would accept me because I had not been, and they didn't believe me, but I had to prove it and I had papers, records. And I was the only Nisei in school except for another from the East Coast, and I used to tutor in math. I was the only person they'd speak to, that was from my second year in sophomore. But the strange thing was, unknown to me, there was a Japanese language school taught by Japanese, Isseis, mostly Isseis, (few) Niseis, I never saw one on the streets in Ann Arbor, one because I never went into town, two, because they probably kept to, they were told not to go into town. But the interesting thing is that during the summer, just before I entered the University of Michigan, I worked at the University of Michigan (Hospital) running their elevators. And while I was working there, I lived at the neuropsychiatric hospital, which was empty at that time, this was Michigan. And it was filled with Japanese who were, Japanese Americans who were released to go to work outside. And even though I'm sure, a surgery suite, because there were drains right in the middle, I got to go, they had dances and so forth. But after school began, I never met one of them. I kept in touch with Albert Saijo, you probably know him. He was an artist in every sense of the word, a nice person. He's in Hawaii now, isn't he?

PW: Unfortunately, Albert has passed, and his brother Gompers also has passed, but I know who you're talking about.

HS: He's a gentle soul, a nice man. Well, anyway, there were nurses and technicians. If it weren't for them, the hospital couldn't have survived. And the other people working there were white kids from the Appalachians, I never met anybody like that before, they were interesting. After I got to know them, they told me what to do on the elevator. He said, "Now, if you're getting tired, what you do is you overfill the occupancy on elevators, make sure you have a lot of people on, and then take the elevator as high as you can, and it will drop all the way below level in the basement, and then it won't move again and you'll have to call maintenance." I did that only once, I thought it was silly. And he told me, says, "Now, you're going to be hungry at times," and he says, "what you do is you wait for the food service cart to come out," he says, "You take it back, and you don't take any passengers with you, and you stop between levels, and then you can eat all you want." That's how I survived.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.