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YY: Now, talking about friends, when we went to... well, what happened is that while we were in the seventh grade, that year before Pearl Harbor, all the seventh graders on the island were sent to Lincoln school. Lincoln school was a small enough school that there was only one class per grade. But the seventh grade, they had two seventh grade classes. The other came from Pleasant Beach school. It must have been overcrowding or whatever, but they decided to have two seventh grade classes. Toshi and Kiyo were from Pleasant Beach school and they were in that other seventh grade and there were the five of us girls that were in the regular, you know, the regular seventh grade. So we knew each other from a young age, but we were not that close of friends until we got to Manzanar. Because we had this time we could spend together, you know, we were same age, same class, that we bonded. And so we started doing everything together, eating together, going to church together, fellowship, concerts, classes, playing at the rec hall, just having a good time. Then eventually, people saw, and someone, I don't remember who, started referring to us as the 7-Ups and the name stuck. We did... I remember though, we did keep in touch with the friends on Bainbridge, classmates. Even the soldiers who guarded us on the train... and we wrote letters. They sent us pictures. [Laughs] I still have them. But the classmates were faithful and they did write. Eventually it kind of tapered off. But interestingly enough, we started to receive letters from the outside world, too. But that came a little later. In Manzanar, after we finished our seventh grade work, then the school did not open until the middle of October. So there was a big span there. And then we started as eighth graders.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.