<Begin Segment 14>

TL: As part of the pilgrimage, one of the, one of the opportunities was to make a hike up to Castle Rock. And Mrs. Nakano, you've said that you and your husband had gone up together, and also that he had been part of a marathon?

YN: Yes.

TL: Maybe you could talk a little bit about those experiences, and then I'd like to hear from you who made that hike today. So, what was the occasion that you and George went up there together?

YN: Later on after we were interned, they began being a little bit more freer, and one of the things was that we could go hiking up at Castle Rock. You had to get permission. George and I wanted to go up there to be alone for one thing -- [laughs] -- we could never, ever be alone; and we got permission. And his mess hall at that time made us a lunch, and we were teased like anything when we went to get our lunch. And we went up, and we did that twice. We climbed up, and we saw Tule Lake from up there. And they were asking me, "Was the sight, wasn't it beautiful out there?" And I says, "It wasn't the sight that I went up there, it was to get away from the camp air. Also, to be alone." But I didn't look at the sights so much because of the fact that we knew there were rattlesnakes, and so my eyes were always just glued on the rocks and the path that we were following. And we had lunch up there and came back. And in my diary I have noted that even the air seemed much cleaner and fresher up on Castle Rock than inside the camp; I hated to go back into camp again. But we did that twice.

About the marathon, they had a marathon race and they had teams from each ward. And my, and George was one of the members of our ward, the Alaska ward. They didn't even train or anything. It was a bunch of young macho men that did this. [Laughs] This was before I was married. My husband is a smoker, and I thought that was dumb of him. Well, he went ahead and did his stretch and then came back. We could not watch this, so when he came back, I was going to go to his room to see how he was. Well, he was hiding from me, and he told everybody not to tell me where he was, because he was absolutely sick, he was really throwing up and everything. And he didn't want me to see him in that condition. [Laughs] He's a very proud man. And that's the reason why I wanted my three sons to go on that Castle Rock.

TL: Well, so what were you guys thinking when you went up there?

HN: It was a nice day. [Laughs] It was a really nice day. It was just nice for me to go up there and get a view of the camp, number one. I think we were probably more interested in the view than Mom and Dad were at the time. But it was beautiful, and be able to see actually the whole layout of the camp up there, because I think Stan brought a map with him; and so we were actually able to kind of look at the map and look out there, and just try to, and again, get a feel for where they were staying. It was tough on ground, though. The site's so huge when you look at it from the ground, it's just like, "Well, it was over there somewhere." But to see it live, and from that altitude, it was great.

SN: Yeah. The other thing that's kind of funny is when you look at pictures of that time, you know, they're all black and white, and then when you go up and see it in color, it's just kind of funny. But it was neat to see the whole, be able to see how huge it was. I mean, 18,000 people, that's a big town. And then going the other way, and you can see Mount Shasta -- that was a beautiful sight.

KN: I think I went up there for a different reason. [Laughs] I'm a landscape architect. And for me what was interesting is kind of the historical layout of a camp, a military camp in this valley which was drained, Tule Lake was drained, so the whole history -- in fact, somebody kept, has been mentioning a plant that's called "the Tule," and I haven't found out what that is yet. So that must have been, Tule Lake was named after this indigenous plant that grows around here called the Tule.

So I went up there more as, just like the historical context of how this military camp was laid out in this physical form that looks almost like a crater of a volcano; and how the whole history of the lake being dredged and it became farmland. So that's why I went up there.

HN: An interesting thing though, too, is, I think -- because Tule Lake's real agricultural, and so I'm assuming it hasn't changed very much, even in fifty years. There's probably a few new buildings and that kind of stuff, but the population probably hasn't changed much. And so looking at it from above, I think it gave me a real sense of what this was like. I mean, even this black and white thing, right, where inside your head you can turn this scene into black and white. It was kind of like the movie where it goes from black and white to color, and black and white to color. And I think you get a real appreciation for what life was like at least from an environmental point of view, what it felt like to actually live there.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.