<Begin Segment 5>

WH: You know, when you think about the films that you took, ice skating and swimming and Obon odori and baseball and hiking and trips to..

ES: Arts and crafts.

WH: ...arts and crafts, what do you think the message is in your films?

ES: Messages?

WH: Uh-huh.

ES: Well, you know, it goes back a little to our bylaws, which are Japanese American-operated. In the bylaws, it doesn't say anything that you're not supposed to do, taking pictures and so forth. But bylaws tells you how you should run a government behind barbed-wire fence. So after reading the bylaws, as the chairman of the block managers, I felt that we can do a lot of things and still be within the rules and regulations of the camp itself. And there's no, nothing against having activities, community activities. So that's where the community activities grew up, from weightlifting to swimming and baseball, skating, all that.

WH: You wanted to keep the kids out of trouble?

ES: Yeah. Otherwise they had no special, no guided activities, and we on the community activities set up a program where we can have these youngsters, after-school programs, or in Little League baseball, or something to keep 'em busy, out of trouble. We had judicial systems there because we wanted to see that people are directed in the right way, and our police department was aware of many things that may happen, so I think as a whole, we had a very good camp bylaws or constitutions among the evacuees.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2005 Densho and The Japanese American Film Preservation Project. All Rights Reserved.