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TI: Let me start off with a quick video slate where today's Monday, May 4th, 1998. I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda and the videographer is Matt Emery and today we're interviewing again Henry Miyatake. This is the, the second interview session. And the last session Henry, we talked about, pretty much your early childhood memories, going all the way up to Puyallup. And what I thought where we'd start today was, one of the things that you, you mentioned last time was, you talked about your, your experiences. What I really recall was in 6th grade when you gave a very pro-American speech. And then over the course of, of a couple of years... you saw things change to the point where now you're, we're in Puyallup in terms of the story. And you're, you're incarcerated for the first time. And I thought it would be interesting to get just your recollections of what you were thinking, as a twelve year old boy during this period being incarcerated in Puyallup. So why don't we start there.

HM: Okay. Before we went to camp my brother decided that because we were restricted to the luggage we could carry, he was going to bring his own vehicle into the camp. And he had a Model A Roadster and he had a converted engine in the thing: had a V-8 in there. And he had spent a lot of work and energy converting it to the configuration he wanted. But because we were bringing, we were able to bring the vehicle in, we decided to pack it with all the essentials that we needed. So his position was, we'll risk the vehicle and we won't know what's gonna happen to it, but on the other hand, we can bring in enough stuff so that we could accommodate our family needs. So consequently we were able to bring in a lot more supplies than the other families had. As soon as we got into camp of course, they confiscated the vehicle and put it into an impound area.

But the camp itself was a kind of bad experience for everybody. And this is the first time I was forced to sleep on hay, hay and straw filled cots. And we had to haul water from the center of the race track where we were located, to the water facilities. So if you wanted to wash your face and hands in the morning, you had to bring a bucket and fill it up and bring it back to your barrack area. This is the first time our family had to sleep in one room. So consequently listening to everybody else over the top of the partitions caused a great deal of discomfort for...

TI: And as all these things were happening, what were you thinking inside about the rightness of what was going on?

HM: Well, I, I guess my parents kind of conditioned me to the fact that if the war did come about, we're not gonna be treated like normal people. And the sense of gaman -- being able to put up with the conditions -- I guess just kind of overruled all my personal feelings.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.