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Q: Chizu, can you, where were you, or the assembly center did you go to, what were your impressions?

CI: Yeah, well, we came from San Francisco and I was going to Cal at the time and my father had been taken after Pearl Harbor, like many community leaders, and so we were left with a fairly large hotel that we had to dispose of. And we had more difficulty in terms of time because we were given three days to leave San Francisco. We were the first group from San Francisco, and so my sister had to work out all the details about the hotel and we all had to just bring whatever we could carry in two suitcases. We went to Santa Anita, we had no idea where we were going, and we were on the train and kept asking, "Where are we going?" And we finally ended up at Santa Anita. Again, we were a group from the San Francisco area. We were probably about the third group that went into Santa Anita. And so we had, again, real difficulties of trying to adjust to life, I think, like Ernie said, in the horse stalls. We, I can remember my mother being extremely depressed and having real difficulty because my father wasn't with us, my older sisters had to make all kinds of decisions, and we had to get ourselves adjusted into this camp life. It was very difficult and it was very, we went in April and we were in Santa Anita. It was okay April and May in the sense of weather, but come June, we really hit that hot Los Angeles weather. Most of us were not used to it, and living in the horse stalls in that time was really very difficult. We felt especially sorry for the women that we saw with young children because they had such a difficult time with putting their babies who are in the crawling stage into the dusty old, dirty horse stalls and also with having to adjust to the food situation, the washing situation and things at the camp. When I went into Santa Anita, I did have a chance to work with a group of people on the educational recreational aspects of camp and that kept me very, very busy because there were so many problems that arose with the fact that this was totally a new experience for everybody including people in charge who didn't seem to know what they were doing.

Q: Which camp did you go to?

CI: I went to Santa Anita. And that was again a racetrack.

Q: No, then where did you --

CI: Oh, from there. We went to Topaz and that's where I met him. We went to Topaz. But I could remember that first day we went into Topaz, there was a, there was a windstorm and, and there was, the whole place was just blacked out. We came in, evidently, there wasn't a place ready for us and we had to spend that night really in terrible circumstances because they couldn't figure where to put us, they put us into schools or whatever it was.

EI: It rained that night.

CI: Yeah. It was rainy, it was dust storms and very hard.

Q: What were the fears of people -- either of you can answer this question -- at the time?

EI: Fears of the people?

Q: Yeah.

CI: Well, the, that all of us were, one of the first things that really was difficult for us was not knowing what was going to happen to us. Everything was so uncertain and my mother was sure that we were all going to go out to become farm laborers and that we were all going to be shot, and she would talk about that a good deal. We had the opposite, naive expectation that the American democracy would never do those things to us and so we had to, to deal with that uncertainty. That was very difficult. I guess the second thing was certainly in terms of the bitterness that we felt about being in this situation because we had been brought up on the American dream and American democracy, and it was very difficult for people like us who were students, having to take the reality of what was happening to us with our own, all of our ideas as to how Americans were treated. And I think that was psychologically probably the most difficult to deal with.

In terms of reality, the camps were certainly not good for families. We all lived in one, we lived in one room and there were five of us who were adult children, in a sense, living with my mother. My father came back to Topaz, he was released after a while on the basis that there was no reason to hold him. And so we lived rather uncomfortably in a large, in a room, one room, in a large barrack that was shared with three other people in their own separate rooms. That was, you know, I guess the fact also that we were so close to one another. We were not used to living on top of each other, and that not only included our families, but it included other people all around us, like everybody living all together in one place for a period of time.

EI: Yeah, well, as Chiz is saying, camp life wasn't like some people think camp life is. When you think of a camp, you think of going out to a summer camp and having a cabin and, you know, having fun and all that, but this camp was different. And, of course, first of all, we only went in with what we could carry. That was all that we, so you can imagine the people who had little children who couldn't carry anything except maybe a doll or something, and they had to carry the children's clothes as well as their own. So you can imagine the difficulty they had. And because they couldn't bring much, of course, Sears Roebuck did a whale of a job then because people bought by catalog, you know. And, of course, the difficulty was we were all in this congested area and the rooms were...

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.