<Begin Segment 13>

LH: Well, so your mom wasn't very well at Minidoka. What happened to her in Crystal City then?

MN: She was just a vigorous, alive, fun person to be around. I liked her. The whole gloominess and tragedy and depression of Minidoka was just almost gone. She was a different woman and my father was there. She was just freer. She was open. She was light. She was fun.

LH: Were you able to be a family in Crystal City?

MN: Much more so. I think for one, we did not eat in mess halls. We had little duplex where in-between there was a bathroom, benjo, and then everybody cooked and ate themselves. So there was a sense of privacy, a sense of family. There was a sense of community. My dad's, one of his recollections was in Crystal, they called us Mr. Takahashi, Mrs. Takahashi. I guess that's not the way they were addressed before. We were just things. There was a much healthier sense. I know in Minidoka we had baseball games and we did -- I was part of the dancing troupe and there was entertainment at schools and stuff that people were involved in, but in Crystal a lot of it was much more ethnic. We had sumou wrestling matches.

LH: I was surprised to learn that about Crystal City that there was Japanese language and sumou and a lot of traditional Japanese arts encouraged.

MN: Uh-huh. We went to Japanese school after American school, and then we went to Japanese school all day Saturday and then we went to church on Sunday so there was school every day [Laughs] in one form or another. Lots of activities for kids that were programmed and it seemed like everybody was involved. My friend's father was what they call the police. He used to after sundown, I think nine o'clock, he used to make sure all the young people were in their homes, or something, keep the delinquency down. [Laughs] I don't know what the role of police was. My father was a butcher. Everybody kind of seemed to -- just I don't know. From my perspective and from what I read and from my sisters and from the tone, it was just a healthier, much healthier place. We were incarcerated. There was no doubt about that and the bitterness of the incarceration was there, but they were able to circumvent it somehow and live a pretty decent, closest to a community family life that was impossible in Minidoka.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.