<Begin Segment 13>

VY: I also think about, makes me think about your mom and how you said earlier, when he was younger, she was very, I think you said she was a fun-loving person, creative,  adventurous herself. And here she is, now, she no longer has that option. She doesn't even have the option to join the military and to leave camp, right? I mean, she is, her only option is to be there with her children, who she loves, but she's there by herself to take care of these very young children without any help.

DS: With a seven year old son who is now head of the household. Something happened to my mother's persona in the camp. I don't recall it, but she was hospitalized for fatigue for a week or so while in the camps. I think the stress of living under those conditions were too much for her. I think I've shown you some photographs of the family, family photographs, not taken with a beautiful background but sitting on a pile of rocks. She tried to clothe us and to care for us the best she could. But when you look at the photographs, they're grotesque. We look like migrant workers, refugees. And, in fact, we had left a comfortable, friendly, warm home environment, and now my mother found herself in this barren wasteland in Minidoka. So something changed in her persona, in her personality. As we think about it, and I talk with my brothers, they can't believe that the woman that they saw in home movies before the war was actually their mother that they knew growing up as teenagers, as adults, there was something missing. And I think the stress and the demands that were made on her, the impossible demands, had changed her psyche, but she never talked about it.

VY: Yeah, so obviously --

DS: We had some good times.

VY: Okay.

DS: We had some really interesting times. I think you may have seen a photograph of my brother Jerry, myself, and Reverend Andrews' son with another person at Sun Valley. And it was in the summer of 1943 that we were allowed to, a group of us were allowed to leave Minidoka to go on a summer vacation at a Baptist assembly camp in the foothills of Sun Valley in the Sawtooth Mountains. And it was a wonderful time. I learned how to swim, it was fresh air, it was cool, it was a welcome relief from the camps. And the Reverend Emery Andrews, who was the minister of the Japanese Baptist Church, helped move with his family to be close to his parish, his block, lived in Twin Falls, and ministered as best he could as the minister of the Japanese Baptist church. So it was a wonderful time, and at the time, my father was training with the 442nd in Mississippi.

There was another time when my mother got permission to leave, and she just took me, myself, and she and I went to Boise, Idaho, and stayed overnight in a real hotel, just as a getaway. And it was such an exciting time for me. I came down for breakfast the next morning, and they had wonderful waffles, something that was foreign from the food we ate in the camps. But I still remember, I was so excited, I got sick to my stomach, I couldn't eat the waffles slathered with maple syrup, and I just lost totally my appetite. But I remember the excitement of being out of the camp, eating real food.

There was another trip my mother took all of us, the three boys, on a bus to Ogden, Utah, to visit the Golden Spike, the completion, the site where the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was made. Why she wanted to go to see the Golden is beyond me. But I think that it gives you a glimpse into part of that Kondo inquisitiveness, that Kondo sense of adventure. That could be sort of irrational, but there were elements of that Kondo part of the family, not the conservative, staid Sakura part.

VY: It also sounds like she did everything she could to try to make some kind of normal life.

DS: That reminds me of the picnics she would do for us, she would create for the boys. And we would follow her through the sagebrush to the perimeter of the camp, and we would have picnics in the shade of the watchtowers, just as an attempt to have some normalcy in your camp experience. So it was a life changing experience for my mother. And to this date, it's still almost, it's very opaque what really happened to her.

VY: One thing I wanted to ask you was about your grandmother. Now, this was your father's mother, right?

DS: Well, my father's mother Misa lived with her oldest son. The two older boys were too old to go into the army, so she was in the camps. My mother's mother, Baachan, lived with us.

VY: Okay. Do you have, do you remember her very much?

DS: She was a very difficult, I would say, high strung individual. She was not easy to live with, so you can imagine your mother-in-law, or your mother, with three young children living in an unheated barracks, not air-conditioned, in the middle of the desert. It's inconceivable.

VY: It is.

DS: It was difficult, but when you look at photographs or you read the Minidoka Irrigator newspaper, or look at the yearbooks, you get the sense that people all tried to live a life of near normalcy under excruciating conditions, and we survived.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.