<Begin Segment 18>

LH: Crystal City, could you give me a little description about the kinds of people that were in Crystal City?

MN: There was us, the Americans, the Japanese, our parents' age. There were Germans, definitely. There were Japanese Peruvians.

LH: When you say Germans, were those German Nationals or German Americans?

MN: I think they were German Nationals. They seem to be much closer to -- there were some kids of German ancestry there, but I think they were German Nationals. I really don't know. There were Germans in camp. How they got there, who they were, I'm not so sure. Later on I find out there were Latin people there too, I mean, Italian people there too. I don't remember Italian people being there, but this is what the college professor is telling me that there were some Italian people there. But we used to later on get movies in camp and we saw Japanese movies, American movies, Spanish movies, German movies. We used to get movies in all different languages. [Laughs] It was really weird because we used to love these obake movies, these ghost movies, Japanese. They were so scary and I remember the Spanish ghost stories are just, really just frightened the heck out of us. We didn't understand the language as much, but the communication were there. They were scary Spanish movies.

LH: And they were in Spanish because of the Japanese Peruvians that were at the camp?

MN: Uh-huh. And isn't it funny? In camp, there was a lot cross cultural sharing. My dad came home when he was butchering with the German butchers, he came home and told us that the German people had mythology all around the badger, too. We used to hear all kinds of Japanese stories about the tanuki, but apparently the Germans kind of treat the badger in the same kind of mythological story telling way that we do, that we did. It was kind of funny.

LH: So did you actually play with German children and with Japanese Peruvian children?

MN: Yeah. My recollection about -- my direct recollection is I used to kind of... the little kids, the Peruvian kids were little. I don't remember any Peruvian kids in school with me. I can't. Just none of my friends. I can't remember them among my friends. I do remember my one encounter with a German girl. I don't know why she had no hair, and she was harassing my kid sister at the playground so I had to stand up against her somehow, and we get into a silent hand-to-hand battle. She had advantage over me 'cause she'd grab my hair, and she didn't have any hair for me to grab onto. And we had this silent struggle between us and pushing and shoving, and we finally got pushed apart. And we both kind of started for a minute kind of wondering are we going to hit it again, and I guess about the same time, we just quit and turned around and left. And that was the first and only battle I ever had with a person that was physical. [Laughs] And I remember her. I don't remember her name, I just remember the one incident from camp.

LH: So your memories of Crystal City are -- could you compare Crystal City to Minidoka? Just in general...

MN: Oh, night and day, just night and day. For one, our family was back together. That meant a lot to everybody in the family. So my mom was out of bed. She was happy. She was just great. My father, he was not -- he never turned into the stern man my mom said that he was going turn into. [Laughs] One of the first things that the kids did was open up his suitcase and found that he had comic books, and that was so delightful because my mom says my father is so serious. He's not going to tolerate us reading comic books anymore, and he had comic books. [Laughs] The entire atmosphere was different. There really was a sense of community. There was all kinds of activities. We had sumo wrestling. We had shiginkai, we had... I was involved in Japanese shibais, plays. The schools were involved in stuff. The churches were involved. My sister used to wake up at 5:00, 5:30 in the morning, and go to taisou classes where they would exercise and keep their body fit. It was, my memory of Crystal City actually is a happy, happy memory. The family was happy, everybody. The surroundings seem to be functioning. There was no gloom and despair and ugliness that there was in Minidoka. To me it was a fun time.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.