BN: Before we go to Tule Lake, at Manzanar, I wanted to ask you about if you were involved in other kinds of activities, sports or, you mentioned you were a little too young for the Boy Scouts.

NK: Well, at the age of twelve years old, all you think about is playing. But in the meantime, school started, and I was in the seventh grade, remember, I was going to junior high school at the camp. And by then, the school system was very well organized. (They had) all these Caucasian teachers that were hired to teach us in the camp. And I remember that we had a music teacher named Frizzell who is pretty well-known now. And I was in his class a few times for music appreciation and so forth. But a twelve-year-old trying to learn music, it wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but I lived through it.

BN: This is (Lou) Frizzell?

NK: Yes, yes.

BN: I think your friend made a film about him, Brian Maeda?

NK: Yeah, Brian Maeda.

BN: You hear stories about kids being able to leave camp and hike and fish in camp. Were you one of those who snuck out?

NK: Each... not every block, but depending where you came from, you all had these groups of kids that formed groups. We had a, kind of a group of teenagers in our area, and I remember that, as a kind of a recreational break, somebody organized (a group) to go for a hike up Alabama Hills. And I don't know if you're familiar with Manzanar, but on the south end was a... of the Owens Valley... is Alabama Hills, something you'd look at every day but you'd wonder what's on the other side. So they organized a one-day hike that you would go to Alabama Hills and then come back. I was very interested in that, so I joined that group, and we were all teenagers, and we started out early in the morning, and was warned of all the snakes and be careful of this, and, "Don't fall off the rocks," and so forth. (They) talked about the snakes, and yet, when you start walking, you just kind of doze off and keep your legs moving and go up the hill. But this one guy screamed at the top of his lungs, and everybody looked, turned around and looked, and sure enough, there was a rattlesnake in the path. But nobody got bit and we made it back to the camp okay. But that was kind of an exciting outing for us compared to waking up every morning and looking out to see the mountain and then going back and doing what you have to do. There was also the same group of people that said, "We're going to go fishing." And so there's many streams that went through Manzanar, and naturally, in camp, with all the people out there, there was no fish to be seen in the camp. But there's all the people that kind of chaperoned us and took us in, we went to George Creek, which is on the south side of camp, and did some fishing. And we had no equipment, that was my first fishing in fresh water, you might say. I tried my luck, but it was no good. I didn't even smell any fish. But the guy that kind of organized it had some experience, so he walked a mile up more and got into a nice quiet spot and he caught a trout. And that's the first time I heard of a fish being caught from Manzanar.

BN: Anything else about Manzanar before we move on? One thing I didn't ask was if your mother or brother had jobs.

NK: My mother had no jobs. My brother was a G-man. In other words, they had trucks that went from block to block picking up trash, and he was one of the guys on the back of the truck picking up the trash and throwing it on the truck, and so he was a G-man. My sisters did not work, so my brother was the only one that had a job at sixteen dollars an hour.

BN: And you and Kazuye were too young?

NK: Yeah, we were much too young. Oh, I take that back. At Manzanar, they had a camouflage manufacturing site, and a friend of mine in the same block said... we were talking, and he says, "Hey, let's go see if we can get a job at the camouflage net place." And so we were only twelve years old at that time, and naturally you had to be much older than that. But my friend was a good talker, and so he went down there and he talked these people into hiring me and my friend. And so we did about one day's work, and that was the end of our job.

BN: Was that your choice or their choice?

NK: It was their choice.

[Interruption]

BN: And yeah, I wanted to ask about a bicycle.

NK: Oh, yeah. When the evacuation notice came out in early 1942, one thing that the government offered was to pick a site and store your household goods. And so we had a few suitcases and boxes and so forth, that we packed up and we took it to the Venice Japanese School, and they had a building that they put up in 1941, '40 or '41, and all the Venice local people took whatever they wanted to maintain over to that area, and they made a storage building. In that, amongst the things that were there... eventually when they... things settled down, they let us bring in what was stored there to the camp. And amongst the things were my bicycle. And having a bicycle was one thing, but getting parts for it was very, very difficult. And one of the main essentials of the bicycle was the tire, which used rubber for the tubes and so forth, and made it very, very difficult to get the bicycle running. But by using the Sears catalog and Montgomery Ward catalog, I was able to get the tires for the bicycle, and so I was one of the few people that had a bicycle to ride in camp. In fact, I'm sure there's people that had bicycles, but it was a luxury to have a bicycle.

BN: Now the storage that you mentioned at the Venice church, is that the site of the community center?

NK: Yes, that was the Japanese school that was... it was originally on Jefferson Boulevard, but in 1941 or '42, they purchased the property right there on Braddock, and that's where the judo... they kind of consolidated the judo and the Japanese school, and that's where they continued on.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.