Densho Digital Archive - Eiichi Edward Sakauye Interview II (denshovh-seiichi-03-0004)

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WH: Right now, we're in the re-creation of an internment camp barracks at the San Jose Japanese American Museum. How does this size room compare with your room at Heart Mountain?

ES: The unit we had was an end barrack, it was 16 x 20, with one potbelly stove, and one ceiling light, that's all there was. And the floors were like this or worse, because the cold draft would come from the bottom.

WH: How did you do your photography at conditions like this at Heart Mountain?

ES: Well, the windows, we had to look for cardboards, and that was Celotex boards that they lined up the inside, and we went to look for those in the scrap pile, and my brother worked in the, in the woodwork shop, so putting those together, we closed up the windows to make a darkroom.

WH: How about developing your film?

ES: Developing film is a very hard situation, 'cause in the winter, the temperature outside goes thirty below zero. Normally in the winter, it's twelve below zero, and summer is, highs is eighty degrees there. In the winter months, when it's cold outside, it's difficult to keep the chemical temperatures where they should be. And in the winter months when it's thirty below zero, we have no running water in our barracks, so we go to the latrine or washroom to get a bucket of water. The bucket we used was not plastic like today, but it was a galvanized bucket, so that wasn't very good for chemical use. Anyway, that's all we had. So I would go to the washroom, pick up a bucket of water, and at that temperature, thirty below zero or twelve below zero, the top of the bucket would be ice by the time I get to my barrack. So we got the potbelly stove going, so we put it on, just a stove like this behind your back, and warm up the water. But we got to be very careful, we don't want it too hot or too cold. It should be around, as I recall, between sixty-five and sixty-eight degrees, so we watched carefully, and then we dissolve our chemical in there. And that made our developing solution. Then our, we had to, after developing, we had to affix it, and we can't use ice-cold water. Again, we have to have normal temperature water. And that kept us busy all the time, carefully trying to meet the needs of proper development. Then some of the high-speed film is a little different, see, so we had to watch out what we're doing.

WH: Tell me a little bit, Mr. Sakauye, about what you decided you wanted to film inside the Heart Mountain camp.

ES: Well, when camera privileges opened up in Heart Mountain, after I got my permission to have a camera in the camp, many of the evacuees had experience in photography and so forth, so they agreed to take pictures. And I didn't know any of 'em except a couple of 'em, and we joined our hands together and go to different spots in the camp and take different views. And everybody, always first thing is take family pictures, friends' pictures, but I had different point of view. I've been a historian all my life, preserving history of certain area or certain things. So I began to take pictures of activities in the camp, and nobody else did. Reason I found out nobody else did is because after the camp closed, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles got together all the amateur photographers of various camps, and I was the only one that took pictures of activities of camp. Others took personal pictures, relatives' pictures, only Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas, had a picture of women splitting wood. The reason for that is there was no other activities. You had to have split wood to keep the fireplace going.