<Begin Segment 13>

BN: So after Merced, that you don't remember too much on...

RM: Going to Amache? Yeah, I remember the train ride where it was quite hot and stuffy, and no air conditioning on the train in those days. It was not comfortable trains, and when you're on those trains for two or three days, kids get pretty restless. And so somewhere out in the desert they stop the train to let us kind of stretch and kind of run around a little bit. But when we got out of the train, we were surrounded by machine gun. So my reaction was that we're going to all get killed, we're going to all get killed out there in the desert. But, of course, that didn't happen, we were put back on the train, and we traveled for another day or so, and we ended up in Amache, Colorado.

BN: What else do you remember about Amache? Were you involved in... you must have gone to school.

RM: Yeah, I was in the sixth grade. I had a Caucasian teacher, John W. Cochran, his name was, and a very nice teacher. I remember he took us out to the Arkansas River, which is outside the camp where we get our water. So we took a hike out there, which was kind of nice, that I remember. Other than that, the only thing I could remember about the camp was that someone told us that we're going to have a war with the next block kids. So arm yourself, collect as many rocks as you can. So we collected rocks but we never had to fight.

BN: Were you involved in Boy Scouts or sports, baseball?

RM: No. I played ping pong, we had a ping pong tournament. I don't know who started it, but each block would have their own competition and the winner would go to the, play against all the champions of all the blocks. So my first opponent was my cousin, Tosh, that was my second oldest cousin. And he didn't know too much about ping pong. But he was about sixteen, I guess, and maybe fifteen, sixteen. And I was ten, but I beat him. And my next opponent was Haluto, and he's good. He was playing before the war, and I used to go to his house and that's how he taught me how to play ping pong before the war. And, of course, he soundly beat me, and he eventually beat all the other champions of the blocks, and he was the first camp champion.

BN: How many years older was he than you?

RM: He must have been sixteen or... maybe six years? Maybe six years. See, he was in high school before the war. He was at Commerce High School in San Francisco, that's the reason I went to Commerce, because that's the only high school I knew. Well, in '45, 1945, he was twenty years old, twenty years old.

BN: And then did your parents work at Amache?

RM: Amache? Yeah. Of course, everybody had to work, otherwise you couldn't buy clothes or any of the incidentals that you wanted. So my mother was a nurse's aide, and so she learned a lot about nursing, so she did a lot of nursing for a family. In fact, Toshiko, when she went to Esparto when she had her last son, my mother went and took care of her for a couple of weeks. So she was a nurse's aide, and my father was a second cook, second cook in Block 8E. My uncle Satoji, the older uncle, was the chief cook. He was the chief cook for the block, and my father was the second cook. So that's what he did until... and we stayed about a year, less than a year, and Hachio, the brother that's below him, found a farmer that needed workers. And so we went to Utah, Spanish Fork, Utah, to farm. And that's where our connection with Fred Wada comes in.

BN: Before we get to that, I just want to go back to Amache for a couple more things.

RM: Okay, yeah.

BN: One was, I think we talked about this, that in your block, which was 8E, right?

RM: 8E. BN: E Block, Barrack number 4, and Apartment D.

BN: But I believe you said that the block was, that was where the San Francisco people were?

RM: No, no. The San Francisco people weren't in Amache.

BN: Oh, that's right, you were...

RM: Yeah, they were in Utah, they were in Southern Utah.

BN: You're coming from...

RM: Sacramento.

BN: Esparto.

RM: Esparto.

BN: So who were your neighbors in the block? Were people...

RM: You know, I don't know who they were, except my relatives, because people in the barrack were my relatives.

BN: Right, right. So you mainly hung around with your relatives?

RM: Well, I'm sure I hung around with friends, too, but I don't remember anybody. Even in the army, I don't remember anybody from the army.

BN: Right. Or maybe you didn't necessarily didn't know where they were from? Once you were there, everyone's kind of the same.

RM: Yeah.

BN: Okay. Well, then do you remember other things like movies, talent shows, that kind of thing?

RM: No, I don't remember anything like that. It was so short that, you know, when you're ten years old, you don't remember.

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