<Begin Segment 9>

KK: And then when we were in camp we didn't have flowers, and so he got us to make carnations from Kleenex and toilet paper, for funerals and things. Well, came graduation, they wanted the auditorium decorated, and he was supposed to go decorate it. But before he went to decorate it, he went out and got a skunk, and he was cleaning the skunk, and he thought he cut these little bags off, and he dug a hole and he buried it and everything. But what he had cut off was the gonads, and the scent bags were still there. And he cut into it and the scent spurted all over him and everything. [Laughs] And he had this skunk odor on him. He tried to wash it off, it wouldn't wash off, he had to bury his clothes. And so he had to go and decorate this auditorium. Nobody could get near him but me. So he and I decorated that auditorium ourselves because we couldn't ask anybody else to come near him. But he did a real nice job. And then he tried to wash it off and he couldn't, he ended up getting an infection, skin poisoning, and landed in the hospital. But he came out of that okay, but I'll never forget the skunk.

But there was another incident. See, we were in Crystal City. Crystal City was a camp that was divided. There were Germans, Italians, and there were Japanese, and it was... the Germans mainly came from South America, a few from the States, but a lot from South America, and one was Dr. Warrack, who was quite a scientist and naturalist. And he taught my father taxidermy, and that's how my father got into that. And he had a turtle one time, a water turtle, and he drowned it, quote/unquote, he killed it. And by that time it was late in the evening, so he says, oh, he's too tired, he can't work on it 'til tomorrow. So he stuck it in the bottom of our ice box -- we didn't have refrigerators in camp, we had ice box. And he stuck it in the bottom of the ice box, and the next morning I went to open the ice box to fix breakfast, and there's the thing moving and looking at me. [Laughs] But I would buy... and I would cook birds, you know, he was learning, so he would use a lot of birds to learn the techniques and everything. And so after he skinned them, the meat was there, so he would leave it and I would cook it up. And I did rabbit, and I did roadrunner, they're kind of tough. We had that instead of a turkey one Thanksgiving. And armadillo. And armadillo meat was really delicious.

LD: It sounds like that's your parents' attitude, was sort of make the best of that situation.

KK: Oh, yeah.

LD: Was that their attitude?

KK: You know, that Japanese attitude, gambare, and make do the best, and do the best with what you have, and you can't help whatever happens to you, you just go along with it. I think that really kept us going. And they both were very committed Christians, Dad not as much outwardly as my mother. Everybody knew she was a Christian, but my father also was a Christian and had a lot of faith. In fact, when everybody else left camp and he was left with the Peruvian children, there was Peruvians in Crystal City, and he conducted school for them and Sunday school for them. And later I learned that from ones I met later on, I said, "Oh, yeah, I remember your father, because he conducted Sunday school for us."

LD: You never, any of you saw your parents or your brothers angry?

KK: Oh, sure. Oh, yes.

HS: About this?

LD: Yeah, about evacuation, about internment.

MM: I never saw any anger.

KK: I did. I saw depression.

HS: I think my mother and dad together did.

KK: And I saw depression, periods of depression, and a lot of worry. But on the whole, that was kept under control and not for public, or not for family viewing. Letters to family were, "everything's okay."

HS: Except when Dad's internment got so long and drawn out, and it seemed like to matter who you wrote to, we wrote to Ed Ennis and Wayne Collins and other people asking them to please release Dad. Because there wasn't any reason for keeping him. The war had ended, and he wasn't dangerous, he wasn't going to do anything. But they just wouldn't release him. I don't know.

KK: I always wondered why they didn't release him. And one of the theories is, speculation is that he was too valuable to them because he helped all the other campers. He wrote the letters of appeal for them and did the interpreting and things for them. But maybe they just had to have him around until they got rid of everybody else and then they could let him go.

HS: In fact, they closed the camp with him, didn't they?

KK: They did. 1947 he got out. And then for two years he was on probation, monthly had to go in and see his probation officer. But when I left you earlier I was saying that he was this, doing all this with the insecticide and all. So when you think of that plus -- his name is George K. Uno, and my brother Buddy's name is George K. Uno. And Buddy had come back in 1938 and traveled around and did a lecture tour. Went to New York, Florida, really across the country and all over. But I think they got the two names mixed up, I don't know, I just thought that because of Buddy, my father was thought to be more important than he was.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.