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Q: How do you feel about the statement that it was for your own safety, that it was just a relocation and internment camp?

CU: You know, there's a woman in Gardena, I think that's where she's at, a Caucasian woman who's very vociferous and very adamant about the camp being called a concentration camp. She has been in court on this reparation deal and where a Nisei who was reading some paper, she would get so mad that she would jump up and snatch the paper right out of his hand. I can't understand why this woman is the way she is. The only thing I could figure, maybe she had a relative that was killed in the Pacific. But to be called a relocation center by no means. All you have to do is look at a movie and movies of a concentration camp, and that's exactly what these camps were. They had a dual row of barbed wire 25 feet apart. They had guard towers with machine guns. I was playing ball and the ball happened to roll within 5 feet of the first barbed wire. When I went to retrieve it, the MP in the tower says, "Move back." He took the safety off the gun and he said, "If you don't move within the next three seconds," he said, "I'll shoot you." Now by no means, by any stretch of the imagination, can you call this a "relocation center." Eventually, yeah, because the Japanese were turned out, you know. They were given jobs, but they were given twenty-five dollars, bus fare, and a promise of a job in the Midwest or the East. You weren't allowed to come to the West Coast. And the regimentation of the guards, you weren't allowed in or out of the camp, you had a six o'clock curfew. How can anyone call it a relocation center? It was a concentration camp, pure and simple. If you... eventually, they started a work program where the unskilled laborer was paid eight dollars a month. Semi-skilled, twelve dollars a month. Doctors, they were paid sixteen dollars a month. Of course, we had no place to spend that money, you know, other than, say, the camp PX. And that's where Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward with their catalog made an awful lot of money.

Later on, I was in a camp, Jerome, in Arkansas. There were two camps in Arkansas, one was called Rohwer. They were approximately 30 miles apart and there was a little town called McGeehee, Arkansas right smack in the middle . My first experience with prejudice per se was when we were given passes to travel to and from the other camps, provided you had a relative and you were going to see that relative. We were given a bus ticket and there were three of us. We tried to get on this bus and at that time, we weren't aware of the segregated conditions, you know, black and white. In camp, we had seen it in action, but I got on the bus and I spotted three seats open in the back so I told my friends, "Well, let's go back there and sit down." It didn't dawn on us that, you know, there were nothing but blacks in the back and whites up in front. So we went back there and we sat down and as I looked up, I see everybody in the bus turning around looking at us, you know. And I thought, "What are they staring at?" And the bus driver, he asked me, he said, "What are you doing back there?" And I said, "Well, what's it look like? I'm sitting." He says, "Well, you're not allowed to sit there." I says, "I paid the fare, I think I'm allowed to sit wherever I please." He says, "Not in this bus." So I looked around like this, then I saw a "black" and "white" situation. So I says, "Well, what's the difference where I sit?" He says, "It makes a difference." I said, "Are you aware of what I am, nationality-wise?" He says, "Yeah, you're a Jap, aren't you?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, what are you?" I said, "I'm Japanese. I come from that camp and your country is supposedly at war with my country and I'm not good enough to sit here? You want me to sit up there with the so-called white folks, is that it?" He says, "That's right." And he said, "This bus won't move until you do." Some little old lady, a white lady, said, "Please, would you come up here? I'll give you my seat." That made me feel bad. I said well, okay. So I told my friends, well, let's go up there and stand. And the lady offered her seat to me and I said no.

There was an incident in McGeehee, Arkansas, where a friend of mine bought a suit. And after he bought it, he was kind of dissatisfied with the color in the daylight, so we went to return it. And the salesman said no, so we got into an argument, we got into an argument with the manager. He said that since a salesman had spent a lot of time on us, it was his prerogative whether to take it back or, you know, not take it back. At which time, I was very short-tempered, hot-tempered. I started to call the salesman all kinds of names, including the manager. Well, then I turned around, I started to walk out, and this guy came at me with a knife. So I put him down and he got up, came at me again, so I put him down and I told him a third time, I said, "You try to stand up and come at me again, I'm gonna really hurt you." At which time, he proceeded to do so, so I put him down and I really let him have it. There were some people across the street that saw this incident and they hollered, "Get those damn Japs." And here they come out of the drugstore, out of the restaurants, out of the department stores, so there were three of us running down the street with half the town chasing us. We didn't know what to do. We knew that if we got caught, we would be lynched; that's the South. There happened to be three trucks picking up ice for the camps and we spotted them by accident, and we made a beeline for each of them. Each truck had two MPs. And when we shouted at them, they, they all looked up and they could see three of us running with half the town chasing. They got scared. They said, boy, never mind that ice, just start those trucks and let's go, you know. So they started to pull out. We had to run to, keep running to catch hold of the back end of the truck, they pulled us up, the townspeople stopped. They went back to get their cars and chase us to Rohwer and we made it through the main gate, I guess five car lanes or so ahead of the whole town, you know. And the MP's at the gate, they didn't know what to do, they were scared, they see the whole townspeople coming. But they just, some of them managed to stop just for stop, and the mayor of that town issued an edict that there would be no more Japanese in that town. This went on for a period of two weeks, at which time the merchants began to complain.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.