<Begin Segment 9>

AM: And now, why did you leave the assembly center in August 1942, before your family left?

JS: We, it was, that was... we, first we volunteered for advance crew to set up the camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, and there was about 155 of us that went to Arkansas then the -- only one block was made yet when we got to Arkansas.

AM: And so you helped do what kinds of jobs?

JS: Well, we had to get the people coming in from the other camps, we had to house 'em, haul 'em into their barracks, give 'em their blankets and feed 'em, and that's it. That was our job for, 'til the camp filled up.

AM: What was it like when you got to Arkansas?

JS: Well, we had five days and five nights on the train, and one night, one day they let us off in the middle of the desert, they set up the machine guns and we went out, stretched our legs. But when we got, and every time we got through a city or installation, military installation, we had to pull down our shades in the car, then when we got to the deep south, then we could open our windows, so it was kind of interesting because all along the railroad, the black people, we'd talk to 'em and they says, "What are you, Indians?" Says, "No," says, "Then you must be Mexicans." Then we tell 'em, "Well, no, we're Japanese, and we're getting sent to the camps back in Arkansas." And they said, "My, God bless you all," and they were real sorry for us.

AM: So they --

JS: And it was really experience. Then when we got to the camps, the people, the Caucasian people running the camps, they were surprised that we all spoke English, so they didn't expect people that spoke English there, so that, so they were real surprised, so they talked to us for hours and hours about our experience.

AM: When you were on the train, was that when you encountered the --

JS: What was that?

AM: -- African American woman? Was that that trip or a different trip?

JS: Yeah, well, that was when I left camp.

AM: Okay, we'll talk about that later, then. Okay, and, so when you got to Rohwer, can you tell us what... you said it was kind of swampy?

JS: Well, we had a lot of mosquitoes, we had to sleep with mosquito netting at first, because it had a lot of swampland, and block by block, they were building the camps, and they had the Arkie workers there building block by block. And then the camp starts filling up with people from Santa Anita first, that group came in first.

AM: Okay. How did you feel... I'm sorry. Describe what it was like, you talked about the people coming into the, from the trains and distributing food, and you also told me about some incidents that happened when you were in camp that, was that --

JS: Well, yeah, we had a survey group of five people that went out to survey the outskirts of the camp, and this Arkie hunter out there, he thought they were escaped prisoners, and he shot some of 'em, but they really, they ran and it was shotgun so they didn't get hurt that bad, but it was, it was quite an experience at that time.

AM: So at, sometimes they let you out of the enclosure, but --

JS: Yeah, in fact, the guard on the boxcar there, he told us, "Go behind the car so we don't see you," so we went out through the back fence and went out to the woods. All it was was swampland and woods.

AM: When did the rest of your family get to Rohwer?

JS: They came in, I think about August, September, about September, I think it was. I really don't remember when they came in.

AM: Okay, but they came later, after...

JS: They came later, uh-huh.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.