Densho Digital Archive
Friends of Manzanar Collection
Title: Mas Okui Interview
Narrator: Mas Okui
Interviewer: Martha Nakagawa
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: April 25, 2012
Densho ID: denshovh-omas-01-0015

<Begin Segment 15>

MN: So, now, when you got to Manzanar, you lived in Block 17, how long did you live there?

MO: I think we lived there maybe a month or so. Because when we moved to the other area, that's when my mother came, when we were Block 27.

MN: So why did you move to Block 27?

MO: Because there were two families in that one apartment, and since my mother was coming, we needed to have more room.

MN: Now was Block 17 built better than --

MO: No, they were all the same. Everything was the same.

MN: And then do you remember when your mother rejoined the family?

MO: No, but it had to be sometime in May or June.

MN: She had the new baby with her?

MO: Yeah, yeah.

MN: And was the baby okay?

MO: No, the baby had, my mother said when she got Yukio, there was a big dent in his heads, and she didn't know whether that was done deliberately or whether forceps were used. But as a result of that, he had cerebral palsy. And the sentiment against Japanese at that time doesn't preclude the notion that someone did that deliberately.

MN: Now your mother was very busy with this new baby and she's got a bunch of kids, but did she have time to work at Manzanar?

MO: There was a time when she worked part time as a waitress in the mess hall. I don't remember when that was, but I know she did it part time.

MN: Now what about your father? Was he able to work at Manzanar?

MO: Not initially because he was not a citizen. Initially only citizens could get jobs. And later on, he got a job at the shoyu factory.

MN: Now, the shoyu that was made at Manzanar, was it only...

MO: It's my understanding that some of it was shipped to the other camps, but I'm not sure.

MN: You mentioned that you saw your father gain weight at camp?

MO: Yeah, yeah, he gained weight. Yeah, he had a belly on him. Partly because he didn't have to work hard. Especially if you have no job at all, you first arrive there, what do you do? You sit and talk to your friends, you eat three meals a day. It was pretty much, you'd see that in a lot of the Isseis because they did hard labor. Now suddenly they go to Manzanar and they don't do that anymore.

MN: What did you see your father do in his free time?

MO: Oh, he learned shigin. He met Mr. Tsuruta of Seicho no Ie, and he started meditating Seicho no Ie, and he became a convert to Seicho no Ie, which still has a church in Gardena. My older brother belongs to that group, he and his wife.

MN: Did you say he also, you earlier mentioned you did shuuji?

MO: Yeah, yeah. Because there was not a lot you could do there. There wasn't much you can do. You had to do something to occupy your time, so they would make some of the kids take shuuji, and these were the very Japanese-type families because you couldn't study Japanese in Manzanar. They teach French, Spanish, they teach English, but no Japanese. So the only place that would teach you Japanese was when you went to the shuuji classes because they were conducted in Japanese, and you were learning to write the Chinese characters, which are pronounced in Japanese. It didn't make much sense to me. And to this day, it still doesn't make much sense.

MN: Now when you were at Manzanar, did your family ever have any outside visitors?

MO: Yeah. We had, our minister from the First Baptist Church, Dr. Long, came to visit us twice. And then a family that lived in Big Pine, the Peach family, they lived in Burbank and had moved to Big Pine maybe in 1941 or so, and they came to visit us once in the camp. And later on, the son Donald, who was my older brother's age, eventually became head sheriff for Inyo County.

MN: How did it feel to have outside visitors?

MO: It was kind of interesting. What we didn't understand is why they couldn't eat with us. They had to eat in the Caucasian mess hall, and they had to pay for their meals. What bothered me later on was when we were doing the project for the Historic Site at Manzanar, was that people in the Owens Valley would come up to us and say, "You ate better than we did." And I would ask them, "Where did you eat?" They said, "We ate in the Caucasian mess hall." And my response was, "Their food was better than ours." Because I remember once this one cook... 'cause I had a job there towards the end of the camp washing pots and pans, and they were arguing about this piece of meat that they were gonna cook. And since I'd taken French, they were talking about filet mignon and I knew what it was, or I thought I knew what it was, and they wanted the cooks to bake it. So they baked it, and one of the chefs, a tall skinny guy, I can't remember his name, but he cut off a piece on the end of it, gave me a piece of it. And I didn't like steak because all we had when we were kids was round steak, chewed and chewed and chewed, and it wasn't very good.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.