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SY: And, and... let's see, so I'm trying to think, the, the whole family, then, ended up going to Manzanar? In other words, the extended family, the uncles, and, and...

BW: I'm a little sketchy about that. I think a couple of my uncles ended up in Manzanar. Tomiji went to Arizona, one of the camps in Arizona. He was living with his wife on a farm in the Long Beach area, so -- Santa Ana, Long Beach, something like that -- and so those people were sent to another camp, and so he wasn't with the rest of the family. But I do believe that Manzanar, I think most of the Furuyamas and my parents were there.

SY: And was there any concern on your mother's part, as far as you know, about splitting up the family like that, about her brother going to a different camp?

BW: Actually, the Tomiji family, there apparently was a little bit of a rift between his wife and my mother and the other women on the Furuyama side, and so I think they were okay with them being in another camp. [Laughs] Or maybe they chose that.

SY: And as far as they knew, though, there was no problem keeping your family together?

BW: Yeah, the rest of the family was together. When I say rift, it wasn't like they were, there was animosity. It's just, they're closer to some than others and so that's what happened. I think they pretty much stuck together in Manzanar and they, I think they all went to Tule Lake together too.

SY: All the brothers, all your mother's brothers.

BW: Yeah, and their families.

SY: And just, and your father, just your father. He didn't have any other family.

BW: Right. Except my, the youngest uncle, Furuyama uncle, he was drafted into the army.

SY: So the whole notion of being sent to a camp, did your mother talk about that much, what that was for her, how she felt about that?

BW: No, not too much. Hardly anything.

SY: So it wasn't a subject that was discussed, or wasn't a subject that she had any kind of negative feelings about?

BW: No.

SY: It was just --

BW: Not 'til much later when I had the, finally, awareness to ask her questions and I thought, "Hey, I should try to get more info so I can hear this while she's still alive." Yeah, which is my fault. I should've done it sooner, both my father and my mother. You know, they were typical. I think the only time they ever talked about camp was sort of as an identifier, like, "Oh, did you know So-and-So who was in Block 22?" That kind of thing. Once they finished that part, then they never talked about life in camp as far as I knew, but my Japanese wasn't that good, so they may have talked about it and I just didn't know. But I never picked up on that.

SY: But didn't you actually go back to Manzanar with your mother?

BW: I did. So we used to go fishing up in the Sierras every year, and we'd drive by Manzanar and so every now and then they would tell a story perhaps. And then I think at least on one occasion, we stopped at Manzanar, went to the cemetery. We took photos. That was both my mother and my father. I have pictures of our camper and the cemetery there. And then after my father died I would take my mother up to the Sierras to go fishing, and one time we stopped and we walked around a bit. My mother had an amazing memory, and she could remember details and things very, very well. So we walked around, I'd say a couple of hours, and she would recall all kinds of stories and identify what was there. Even though this is probably by the '90s, 1990s, everything was different, she could still pretty much place the whole camp scene by just standing and looking. She told me this one story that I still find kind of hard to believe, but I don't think she'd lie to me. She would say it would get very windy, and I said, "Well, how windy was it?" [Laughs] And she would say, she told me this story, like you had to line up to go into the mess hall and so, but the wind would blow, and the wind would blow so hard that all kinds of things would come blowing across and so you had to keep your eye into the wind because who knows, tumbleweeds and all these things. And she said even rocks would be blown by the wind, and they're rolling like this along the ground and if they hit you in the ankle or the foot it would hurt. And so she said you would watch and if a rock is rolling, you had to jump up and let it roll past you, come down, so she said people would, in line you could see them jumping up and down like this to keep the rocks from hitting their legs. I thought, that's pretty windy. [Laughs] I can't imagine the wind blowing rocks along the ground. But I thought, yeah, that's a good story. That's windy.

SY: Did she actually work while she was in camp? Was she...

BW: I suppose so, but I don't know what she did.

SY: And you don't know, then, what your father did?

BW: I did hear he worked on the garbage detail. And I'm sure he did more than that, but the reason why that was kind of interesting is we used to go fishing up in the High Sierras because he was fishing while he was in camp. And the garbage detail got to leave camp to dump the garbage somewhere out in the foothills, and towards, maybe after '42, around, by '43, things started to relax a bit and so the guys would go out, dump the garbage and then spend the rest of the day fishing up in the streams there. And so according to my father, it was like, the garbage detail got bigger and bigger, so as the truck is going outside people are literally jumping onto the truck holding their fishing poles to go out and fish for the day. And apparently the guards, there were guards who went with them. They figured they're not hurting anything, no one's ever ran away, so they basically were very cool about it. And so the guys would fish and then I guess they might catch something, but then they would all come back and they would cook up the trout and eat it. So he, I think, developed a pretty keen interest in fishing, so after the war ended we went to Mammoth and fished up there every year.

SY: So he, did he take you back to the places where he fished when he was in Manzanar?

BW: I'm sure he did, because we used to fish in the streams near Manzanar and I'm sure some of them were places that he remembers fishing. He never told stories or anything.

SY: So he, were, did he take you other places besides that area? Or was that solely the place he liked to fish?

BW: Well, when I was younger we did a lot of stream fishing in the foothills near the Manzanar area. There's a lot of little streams and we would fish for hours in those streams. I can't remember the names of them, but we would drive, park, fish the stream, and then pack up, drive to the next one, park and fish the stream again. But after a while we would also go to other lakes further away, like June Lake and Mammoth Lakes, which I'm sure he never went to during the camps. And lake fishing, of course, to me is more fun than stream fishing. So we did that for many, many years, became his real love and hobby.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright &copy; 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.