Densho Digital Archive - Bill Hirabayashi Interview (denshovh-hbill

<Begin Segment 14>

MA: So your family was sent to, you said, Pinedale Assembly Center.

BH: Yes.

MA: And can you talk about that journey to Pinedale and your first few days there and the living conditions?

BH: Oh, it was a case where you had to fill your own mattress with straw and things like that. And then we were told that we had to get jobs. If you're able-bodied, you'd better get a job. Well, right away, Anice took a job as a waitress, I took a job as a cook's help, that kind of a deal.

MA: Was it your whole family in one barrack?

BH: Yeah, one barrack.

MA: So all of your siblings except for, I guess, Grant, who was in the military.

BH: Yeah, and then my sister was married, and she and Chuck, my brother-in-law, they had a place of their own. But after that, he got... see, Chuck was in the service when the war started, and then they let him, let him out, and then they called him back in. So then my sister was in Denver and all that, and she came to Chicago and my boss helped me get her a job and stuff like that. But I don't know, I guess we were just worried about what might happen to Grant, make sure that he was okay. And beyond that, it was like everybody else was wondering, "What are we going to do if we go out of the camp?" And that's when my wife had the backbone to think ahead, and she said, "We're going to go where we can prove ourselves and establish something," and that's what we did.

MA: And how long were you in Pinedale?

BH: Just only for about a couple, three months. Let's see, May, June... by July or August we were in Tule Lake, they transferred us.

MA: And when you were moving from Pinedale to Tule, did they tell you what was happening, did they tell you where you were going?

BH: Just that we're going to go to a permanent place, and that was Tule Lake. And as usual, the shades got pulled down when the train was going and all that sort of thing.

MA: And what, I mean, what were you thinking when you arrived at Tule and you saw the barbed wire and the guards?

BH: Like I say, so many years ago, now I'm, I've got a fairly good memory, but I really... I don't think I give it a whole lot of thought. Except when I got to Tule Lake and I thought, gee, I'm not going to be working in the mess hall, I got to think of something that's constructive. And that's when I applied for the job at the farm to work on the tractor and stuff for maintenance. 'Cause I had the experience from going to Broadway vocational school when I was in high school. I went to evening classes in Seattle, and that's when I took up some mechanic and also body work at that time.

MA: And so you continued that in camp?

BH: Well, it was just, it was just, what I would call an introduction is all it amounted to. And then, naturally, with a, different things with the war and stuff, I had to quit. But I did that when I was a senior in high school. So that's why when I went to Illinois, then I went to what they called the Greer College, but it was nothing like... what do you call it? A vocational school. And they taught body and fender and welding, that's what I took over there when I went two nights a week until I got my certificate on that.

MA: And you were actually married in camp? You and Anice were married?

BH: Yeah, we were married in camp, yeah.

MA: And what year was that?

BH: 1943 in Tule Lake.

MA: And then how soon after your marriage did you end up...

BH: Yeah, we left for, we took that job to get out of camp.

MA: What did you have to do to leave camp?

BH: They had different applications and things just like anything else. And the person that was doing that, we said, "We want to get," well, she took care of it, "get as far out as possible," I guess. Someplace where we could start out on our own. And it turned out that Barrington, there was no other Japanese at that time, and my boss was a very -- well, he was a caring person, but he was Jewish. And like he said to me, that I was in the same situation that he was, so he knew what we had gone through as far as discrimination. But I really didn't go through that kind of discrimination that he had gone through. Because I was, I was very lucky that my friends were both Caucasian and Japanese.

MA: So in total, you spent only about a year, then, in Tule, in Tule Lake?

BH: I wasn't even in Tule... less than a year, 'cause by May, we were out of there, or June. In June we were out of there.

MA: And your parents and younger siblings?

BH: They stayed there, yeah. And the next thing we heard from them was that this "no-no" thing started in camp, and they got transferred to Heart Mountain.

MA: What did they say about that situation, about the...

BH: All I know is we heard from them saying that they were getting transferred to Heart Mountain, so we heard from them from Heart Mountain.