Densho Digital Archive
Frank Abe Collection
Title: Gloria Kubota Interview
Narrator: Gloria Kubota
Interviewer: Frank Abe (primary); Frank Chin (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: August 28, 1993
Densho ID: denshovh-kgloria-01-0007

<Begin Segment 7>

FA: When you first got to the camp, you told us a little bit about your first impressions, but were you -- tell me again, what was your very first impression of how the conditions were at the physical, the location in camp, Heart Mountain?

GK: Well, it was a windy, desolate place, and sagebrush, and it's nothing like California. It's really, really wind blowing, and they had rattlesnakes on my neighbor's porch. You know, it was just scary all over, 'cause we're not used to that desolate, sagebrush country. And we always worried about our kids playing outside. But well, I don't know... no trees. It's just really, if you're used to California, well, it's really something.

FA: Government and the JACL before you left was telling you that you're going a "resettlement center" where you could start a new life. Were you surprised by the conditions you found instead?

GK: Well, they gave us barracks to live in but it's not, you just give up everything you have at home. We were married for four years, and gosh, we could only take fifty pounds apiece. And what we ended up taking was a few clothes for ourselves, but mostly our daughter's clothes and we took canned milk and things like that to be sure that she has enough food and everything. And by the time we went and got a suitcase to put our clothes in, it was those paper suitcases that you can't hold much in anyway. And we brought tin plates, when we were in Santa Anita, we had to stand in line to go eat at the table and so we brought our own tin plates to get our food. So you know, everything, it was very sad. And standing in that hot, hot sun, it was just terrible. I think I lost about twenty pounds while I was there, in just a short time.

FA: When you got to Heart Mountain, did you have a sense, Gloria, that this is wrong, we shouldn't be here?

GK: I always felt it was wrong. Because we know nothing but this country, and so I just thought that what the boys were doing, and when they came to ask my husband to translate what they're doing into Japanese so they could get help from the Issei parents that have money, because they knew eventually they're going to court. So that's how my husband really started. And I guess I was kind of for him doing that, even though my brother was drafted from the outside and he was in the army already, and not getting treated like first-class American soldiers because they were being watched very closely. So I just thought it was really wrong. I don't know why I felt that way, because I guess a lot of the other people didn't come out and say what they felt. I was, always tended to give my side of it, my husband was, studied law, and I never was one to believe him wholeheartedly, let's take his word for everything. If I thought it's questionable, I would question him, and he says, "Why are you like that?" I said, "Because sometimes I doubt what you're saying, I don't want to be convinced." [Laughs] But that kept him on his toe and it got me smarter because I knew what kind of things to say. And then he really was educated enough to get me thinking more or less that way, I think.

But I really believed in it. I really believed the Niseis shouldn't be drafted from behind the fences, because we couldn't go out of the fences, there were sentries watching us, if you went under the fence you could get shot at. In fact, I think a few people did.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1993, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.