<Begin Segment 17>

MN: So you're just a child in Manzanar, and what did you see the Issei, the older Issei doing all day?

MO: I remember, I don't know what all of 'em did, but I remember this one man, and we had locust trees in Manzanar. They had been there before we moved there, and some of them were cut, and they would cut a wedge piece and they had this beautifully sculpted outer edge, but they were very hard. And they would use 'em for ikebana, the flower arranging, and they would put the vases on there. I remember this one man just sitting there, hours on end, the piece of sandpaper, and just rubbing it. And I looked at them and I said, "Why?" And then in retrospect, I understood he had nothing else to do. How much can you read? How many Japanese language books are available to us in the camps? My father would read in Japanese, he would read in English. The thing was, for kids, it was pretty good because we had a toy loan center, and you could go there and you could borrow toys, and you could check 'em out just like a library.

MN: What other things did you see the Issei making from the woods?

MO: I remember this one man, he had a toothbrush, and I guess he had some chemical, I think it was acetone or something. But he was able to bend the toothbrush, and then glue other pieces of toothbrush onto it and make rings. We have some of those at Inyo County Museum of the Eastern Sierra, where I used to do a lot of work. But some of those rings there, and they would make maybe pieces of jewelry, they would glue the toothbrush handles together and they would make things like that. You saw a lot of people knitting. My mother knitted a lot, because you could send away to Montgomery Ward or Sears. But Montgomery Ward was a big catalog, people, that we would buy stuff from. And there was another place in Chicago called Spiegel. These catalogs were priceless to people because I know the girls would keep looking and looking and looking at the dresses that were for sale. And then they'd get their mothers to sew those dresses for them. For a kid like me, I don't think I had a store-bought shirt until after we left Manzanar, because my mother made our shirts. We were poor.

MN: Now, December 1942, Manzanar had a riot. Where were you when the rioting happened?

MO: We were in Block 27, but we heard about this thing. And this is like a fight in a junior high school play yard where everyone there will converge on the fight. Well, we were going to Manzanar, we must have been, from 27 we were just past the outdoor theater when we heard these pop-pops, pop-pop-pop. I don't remember how many there were, but it seemed like four or five, pop-pop-pop. And we didn't know what they were. And when we arrived there, we were told that someone had been shot. And then we later learned that two of them had been killed, and they'd been shot in the back. And then Dr. Goto, who was the head doctor there, was told that he should sign that they were, on the death certificate, that they were shot from the front. And he refused, and suddenly he was gone. And his wife stayed, Dr. Kusayanagi.

MN: Oh, she stayed? I thought they both left for...

MO: Well, maybe she did leave, yeah. I'll have to talk to Bo about that, because his brother was a medical student. His brother was at Marquette medical school.

MN: Yeah, I think they got sent to Topaz, is my understanding.

MO: They were sent somewhere, yeah.

MN: Let me ask you something a little lighter. You were really good with marbles.

MO: Oh, yeah. I was the marble champ of my block. I had a whole lug box full of marbles.

MN: Did you bring those marbles in with you?

MO: No, I won them from other people. And you could order them mail order. Yeah, we had marbles.

MN: Do you still have those marbles?

MO: No, no. Half of 'em I probably shot birds with 'em. Surprising thing was, we were dedicating the guardhouse at Manzanar, and I was to give a talk. And in my talk I said, "There's something wrong, there are two things wrong with the guardhouse. One is the ladder doesn't come all the way down, which is for obvious safety reasons, and the other is that it has windows in it." And then it dawned on me. Slingshots, we'd make these slingshots, we'd find pieces of wood that were y-shaped, we'd take inner tubes and tie a string around it and get a little tongue from a shoe and make the pocket, and we shot the windows out of 'em. This is after the MPs left. And in talking to my friend Bill Michael, who was the director of the museum in Independence, and he's still my friend today, he lives up in Mono County where he's the chief librarian. But it's... you don't remember everything until suddenly, it's like a word that you hear, and suddenly you remember where maybe you first heard that word. But it's not part of your conscious, it's somewhere in the subconscious. Well, a lot of things that happened in Manzanar, because I think all of us to a certain extent were in prison there, have repressed feelings, and we don't talk about it. It's like my parents, it was "kampu" or "senso no mae," or "senso no ato." That's how they referred to before the war, after the war.

And we hear that over and over, even when I was a teacher in Gardena High, I used to run the Asian Studies program, and the term paper was to interview someone who was an immigrant from Asia, older Asian person who lived through a historical event. And we had six hundred Japanese American kids in that high school, and they said they wanted to interview their parents about being in the camps. They would come to me and say, "They won't talk to us about it." I said, "Ask your grandparents." "They don't want to talk to us about it." And part of it, to this day I'm convinced that what putting us in those prison camps did to us was it made us feel ashamed of being ashamed of being Japanese. And I can ask anyone, and I will ask point blank, "Did that camp experience make you feel ashamed of being Japanese?" Because from the time we were little, my father told me, "You must be proud of being Japanese." And suddenly we're prisoners. And why are we prisoners? The psychology of it, and it's got to be really bad for the Kibei, really bad.

MN: So how did you resolve this as a child? I mean, your dad is telling you, "You have to be proud of your Japanese," but you're in camp, in a prison camp, because you're Japanese.

MO: Yeah.

MN: So how did you resolve that in your head?

MO: You really don't. You just... my father always told me that there are things you can change and things you can't change. And the things you can't change, there's nothing you can do, shikata ga nai. But there are things that you can do things about, and basically you don't take on any battles that you don't have a chance of winning, and that's been pretty much the story of my life. You don't joust at windmills. It's not what one does, because you don't have a chance. But I remember when I started college and I was a journalism major, and a prof told me one day, says, "You know, Okui, you write really well. You'll probably be a great journalist, but you'll never get work." He says, "There's only one Japanese American journalist in the United States." This is 1949. So that's how life is.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.