<Begin Segment 30>

EO: Okay, so now we've gotten to Leupp, and you're in the basement of the, in the Leupp school, it's an Indian school.

HU: Indian school, yeah. One of the good solid buildings out there and they have a dormitory, they have a shower room, they have a dining place, everything set up very beautiful, good structure, everything. But the only thing, just like any other camp, they got a barbed-wire fence, they got a watchtower, and the most Leupp inmate was about seventy-five. They had 300 MP watching us. [Laughs]

EO: You mean there were seventy-five of you and 300...

HU: Three hundred MP outside there. [Laughs] And besides, we have internal security, about seven of them inside the camp.

EO: They must have thought you were really dangerous.

HU: [Laughs] They tried to tell the people, American people outside, "They are dangerous people." And finally, about ten or twelve days later I been released. Then I got a job as maintenance.

EO: You were released into where?

HU: Into the camp. In other words, out of jail, finally my jail days over.

EO: So Leupp is also a camp.

HU: Yeah, in camp; all fenced there.

EO: Oh, I see.

HU: They got a watchtower and 300 MP. [Laughs] But, you see, I had a radio in the Manzanar, I asked my wife to send me a radio. We had two radios, one big one where the shortwave is cut off, you know, they took off the coil. She sent me the big one. I find a couple coil and I reset the shortwave; they come out perfect. I could hear all the shortwave and the broadcast from Japan and everything, but I listen on my bedside and I covered up in the nighttime and listened to it. In, that was June 1943, they broadcast in the Japan they're digging the pine tree and the roots, those pitch from the pine tree, they squeeze that for the fuel for airplanes, they said. Oh boy, that's the end of the line. Then they said sawdust, they make like a bread, some way they mixed with a chemical, makes like a bread and they eat that. The food is shortage, fuel is out, Japan never can win the war. But I don't want to tell the other people that I notice that. I wrote, and...

EO: Now, who are these other people in Leupp?

HU: Oh, they're from all over the camps. I got all the names there. You know, one of the men from Tule Lake, Mezu, he's the head of the Japanese newspaper, Nichibei. Mezu. [Laughs]

EO: What were they in for?

HU: Well, they were from Tule Lake. They against sign the paper of the loyalty oath. They tell the people, "Don't sign anything," so they had about 100 or 150 people demonstrate for, "Don't sign anything." So they picked a leader, fifteen of them and sent to Moab and eventually land in Leupp.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.