<Begin Segment 8>

MA: So can you talk about your memories of Tanforan and your first day there, maybe?

CY: Oh, yes. I've kind of forgotten, it didn't seem to leave any lasting bad memories. But then when you really think about it, it was the first time that I slept on a mattress filled with hay. And then on top of that, we had to sleep in a horse stall. And I was thinking to myself, "My goodness, if they told me to evacuate now from this house and go to a horse racing place and sleep in there on whatever bed that you had" -- well, we didn't know, but then we had to fill our own bag of, bags of, for the mattress. And my mother had kind of a division of labor in her mind that something like that was not a woman's job. And so my two brothers had to fill all of our bedding. But, so, I mean, that was my, our family's feeling, so there was all this division of labor, what a girl was, a woman was expected to do, and what the menfolks' responsibilities were to the family. And so my brothers took it as part of their, you know, upbringing. And we didn't think anything... it's a natural thing, that's how we were brought up.

MA: And your mother really sort of emphasized that? Your mother emphasized that?

CY: Oh, yes, uh-huh. I mean, she was very, very Japanesey. She had no intention of becoming an "Americanized" person because she was gonna go to Japan, I mean, she was gonna return to Japan and rear her family in Japan.

MA: So she maintained a lot of the traditional Japanese...

CY: Oh, she maintained every part of it. She had no intention of learning what the American culture was going to provide for her children until my sister started to go to college. She wasn't about to listen to all these Japanese, you know, things. And so my brother used to say, "Boy, I wonder what Mama would have said about, I would have been scolded if I acted like my sister." [Laughs] She's ten years younger, so I was twenty by the time she was ten, and then when I was, she was ready to go to college, I was a married woman. So it didn't bother me.

MA: So how long, then, were you in Tanforan? When did you arrive and when did you end up leaving?

CY: Arrived in May, I think.

MA: May of '42?

CY: May of '42, and we left in September. Because my brother was an electrician, so he, they asked him to leave ahead of our family and he went as the work crew first, about a month or so before we, the whole camp arrived. And so we were one of the first trains to leave for Tanforan because my brother was already there.

MA: So you left Tanforan in September but your brother was already there helping in Topaz, helping to build?

CY: He was the electrician, so he put in all the lights and things. Not all by himself, but with other electricians.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Topaz Museum. All Rights Reserved.