<Begin Segment 12>

JN: Okay, we'll jump back to Minidoka, or Manzanar. You, it seemed like you had a fun life with the young men and women that lived there, or that were there. Did you find that the men were, like, leaving or disappearing to, to go in the army, or how did it feel, did lots of men leave and did they come back, or how did you know?

MN: My friend, he went, was in the one in Minnesota, you know, where all the... what was that called? Where all the, maybe the educated boys were taken... what was that called? Fort Snelling, in Minnesota? And then they trained the boys to...

JN: Intelligence?

MN: Yeah, intelligence, uh-huh. 'Cause these boys were all university-goers, and so I know, especially, I know a lot of 'em were, towards the end, after we left the camp, were in the army, lot of 'em went to Japan as interpreters.

JN: Do you know of men that went to, went into the army, and did any not come back during the time?

MN: No, like my brother-in-law, and this friend of mine, Joe, they all came back from... I don't know of anyone among, even my cousin, he came back. I really don't know -- oh, my brother-in-law was killed, he was with the 442nd.

JN: What do you remember about when they sent out that patriot... where you had to declare whether, you know, whether you wanted to be a... [shuffling papers], when you had to declare how, if you were a patriot or not? Remember that survey that the government gave all the families, and what do you remember and how did that, how did you feel about that and what kind of reaction did people have in that?

MN: You know, like in our case was girls, so I guess we didn't talk about it, or... and just, just very few men that I knew were very much against, but that's about it. We never talked among us, you know. I know in camp they had some fights over it, but it was kind of more like a hush-hush kind of thing. We didn't hear people talk about it much. Maybe we all being girls in the family, if we had maybe boys or something, it might have been different, talking about things like that.

JN: Did you see any of your friends leave to go into the military?

MN: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

JN: How did you feel about that?

MN: Oh, we were so happy that they were gonna serve for our country, and we used to go and bid them farewell. Never regretted or anything. We gave them a good sendoff. It was for our country, so...

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.