<Begin Segment 7>

FK: No, that's... yeah, tell me more about that day, the day that we left. What do you, what do you remember about the day that we left on the ferry?

SO: About leaving?

FK: Yeah. Did they come around to your house and pick you up, or did you go to the dock yourself?

SO: As far as I know, they came and picked us up because we didn't have transportation to get down to the ferry dock. In fact, there's a couple of images, I think, that show clearly that the army trucks were the way we were then taken down to, down to the ferry. I think in terms of individuals, the soldiers, the servicemen who were connected with guarding us were very decent. In other words, these were probably kids from Brooklyn, elsewhere, who knew nothing about the Japanese, and here they were given the task of, quote, "guarding us." I'm not sure whether we were going to escape or whether... what we're gonna do, what were we gonna do, escape, ran away and they'd come after you with a gun and everything else? Because these soldiers had arms, but no, I think that matter of the actual removal was something, I think, which you all took at, maybe it wasn't too bad. If you look at some of the old photographs, the women especially are well dressed, as, like in the Sunday best. I thought, oh my God, this, when I think of it now, people being sent off to some unknown place dressed up like that? I mean, you got to be out of your mind. But this is the way it happened because nobody told us. I know that all these instructions that were given to people living on Bainbridge Island, you take this, this, and this, but we never knew where we were going. I can remember the train ride down, which wasn't too bad. We had Pullman service, and the soldiers were quite friendly. There was no animosity in terms of saying, you know, "you dirty Japs" and all that. It was, it was a whole different situation. But once we got down to -- and this kind of leads into the other bit -- we went to L.A. and then were transferred to buses, and the conditions of the bus to get to Manzanar is the part that most people play up as being a hardship. Well, it was hotter than the dickens, and you're not gonna get air conditioned buses at that point. Maybe the government had other business they wanted to attend to, so that the, so that part of the actual move to camp wasn't, in my mind, a hardship as such. I mean, after all, you got well operating buses. I think other communities had different experiences, even in case of Puyallup and others, where the hardships were rather evident. Only hardship I can think of in the move, when we first moved to Manzanar was that, put straw in your, as a mattress, but that corrected soon thereafter. A lot of other things were corrected, too. I can remember people talking about canned spinach. Well, you're trying to feed a town of ten thousand people, ultimately how do you do it? The army was concerned enough with feeding its own troops, now we've got this group of hundred and ten thousand people we have to take care of, which they did. And so that when the spinach episode, that was one thing that affected the Manzanar people because, well, to this day I still don't like spinach. [Laughs] But it's, we didn't have the traditional rice and so forth, though that came, that came later, but it took the government a certain amount of time to resettle.

When I think of it in broad picture, you set up instant town of ten thousand people, you got to provide all the services, health services, food services, fire protection, police protection, and that's amazing what could have, what did happen in a relatively short time. To have those facilities in place to take care of ten thousand people in camps and to provide any and all needs. That's where I kind of got lulled into, maybe not lulled, but into a position where working as an internee was something I kind of took very positively. I can remember seeing, on the first or second day in camp, a little sign posted saying: "Wanted, somebody to take some food to, to the people who were, who needed the food," and this was a case of my having to go through mess hall, get a selection of food to take to one of the barracks which housed kids and parents who were, had measles, and so I was told not to touch anything, but just give the food and then take the pans and so forth back to the mess hall. That's when I became somewhat more interested in the kind of service that maybe I was doing unknowingly, that is, they needed help. Then at one point I think I said to myself, "I want to be a doctor," which never happened, but that was one of my, one of my thoughts at that point, because I liked doing that kind of work because I then felt in some sort of way that this was being of service to the Japanese. Sure, everyone had to do some kind of work, and I don't think the matter of hardship as such should be a factor. Now, it's true, no one liked to work for fourteen dollars a month or what have you, and no one likes to do some of this dirty work, but someone had to do it. And then you get a town of, and each of the camps had ten thousand, so then you're talking a community of ten thousand, most people wanted to work. They didn't want to sit, sit around, so that there's a kind of motivation to say, I want to do something. I want to learn something. I want to do something. And so that, I think about what would be, or is considered to be a hardship. It's hardship under what kind of definition? Because I was able to take this food to kids who had measles, was that a hardship? I can remember, you and I can probably remember, at this point, let's see, Don Nakata is how old? He would've been about seven or...

FK: Yeah.

SO: He and his brother both came down with measles, and I was the male orderly who would serve, give them the food and so forth. And we had changed considerably, but I can remember Don and Bobby, I don't know whether, oh no, I don't think Wayne ever contracted measles, but I'm not sure.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.