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BY: But didn't you also say that you had a job where you had to deliver milk to the mothers or something like that?

HY: Oh, yeah.

BY: Can you tell about that?

HY: That was in Pinedale, and that's when I learned that my Japanese was heta, bad. Because I'd always thought that I was speaking standard Japanese. At Pinedale I learned that I wasn't, I was speaking dialect. But I never knew that.

BY: So can you tell the story about...

HY: Yeah. One of the jobs, we had a lot of jobs. At Tule Lake I'm not... this is Pinedale. At Pinedale, I think one of my more interesting jobs, I was a toilet inspector. [Laughs] At Pinedale, they had outhouses and they had showers, and these were separate buildings. But the outhouses were pit holes, you know. So one of my jobs is I'd go around with my little bucket of white powder, I think it was lime, but I'm not sure, sodium hydroxide, and dump it in the hole. And then I'd go knock on the door -- these were two-hole privies -- knock on the door of the women's, I said, "Dare ka haitemasu ka?" "Is anybody in there?" And most of the time they'd say, "Hai, hai," or there would be no answer. So sometimes I'd open the door, and my god, there's a woman squatting on the pot. [Laughs] But that happened to me in the shower, too, that's where I ran into a naked woman in the shower one day. She didn't answer. So I had to change the foot bath solution, sodium hydrochloride. In those days, before you went in the shower, you had to put your feet in the foot bath, which was a disinfectant for fungus and toenail rot and so on. But anyway, I knocked on the door, "Dare ka haitemasu ka?" No answer, I'd go in there, a naked woman. I beat it out of there. Nobody reported me as being a sex fiend, you know. [Laughs] That was one of my jobs.

But another job -- and this one was by myself -- I made my rounds of the toilets myself. But the milk run, there was a driver and we had a had a guy that handled the bottles. And then another woman, another young girl, actually, and me. And our job was to distribute the bottles of prepared milk. This is formula milk for the newborn babies. But most of those mothers in those days, 1942, were Issei, young Issei women, not so many Nisei women. Of course, the Issei women spoke Japanese. So when we come up to a certain block, the women would be lined up to get the bottles, I'd say, "Nanchu nan desu ka?" In Japanese, to me, that says, "What is your name?" And they'd look at me, then they'd catch, they'd say, "Oh, my name is so-and-so, Watanabe," or something. Then my friend and helper would give them a bottle of formula. And then after we left to go to the next block, the young lady that I was working with, she said, "What did you ask that woman?" I said, "Nanchu na desu ka?" "What is your name?" She said, "That's not the way you ask for a person's name. You say, 'Onamae wa nan desu ka?" Until that day, I never knew that I was not speaking -- because my mother was an educated woman, she's a junior college graduate and a teacher, and she spoke Okayama-ben at home with my father who had never gone to college. But I'm sure he knew standard, you know, Teinen na Japanese. Teinen means respectable, fine Japanese. But in Hood River, there were so many people from Okayama that I think we all spoke dialect unknowingly. Because it seemed like what you call a rice paddle, shamoji? We called it a shakushi, and things like that. All kinds of little terms that only Okayama-ken people understood. But I never knew that; I thought I was speaking good, standard Japanese, and it wasn't.

BY: So not until you got to camp did you realize...

HY: Then I realized, oh, I'd better not try speaking Japanese. "Nanchu nan desu ka?" [Laughs]

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.