<Begin Segment 5>

SF: Which assembly center were your family sent to, was your family sent to?

GH: We went to Santa Anita. I think that was in May, or... pretty sure, and we're there 'til September and then we went to Heart Mountain.

SF: Where, what do you remember about Santa Anita?

GH: Santa Anita?

SF: Yeah.

GH: Well, that's the first time I've seen that many Japanese all together at one time. Ten thousand people there, we're all in a one-mile area, so something different.

SF: So did your family get one of the new barracks, or one of the horse, horse stalls?

GH: We had one of the new barracks, yeah. We're in the, they call it the "yellow mess" area. There were five, five different mess halls, I guess, and had, each section was divided up into either the yellow or the green or the blue mess, red mess.

SF: Do you remember many guard towers and soldiers around at Santa Anita?

GH: Not inside, but on the perimeter there were, they had barbed wires and watchtowers, yeah.

SF: How did it feel to be inside a situation like that?

GH: Well, initially it really bothered us, but then after a while you get kind of like, get kind of used to seeing 'em around.

SF: One of the things that happened at Santa Anita was a so-called "riot." Were you involved with that?

GH: With the riot?

SF: Yeah.

GH: Well, only as a spectator. 'Course, when they started to gather together, curiosity brought me there, and I... it was kind of scary.

SF: So I remember you telling me that you were in the front row of this crowd.

GH: It was, well, there was a guard there, looked like a security guard-like, and of course, I was face-to-face with him, and there must have been fifty people there, or a hundred people in back of me. And he had his gun out and he was waving it around and he was gonna, he threatened to shoot everybody, but I couldn't back away, because there was so many people behind me. That was really scary.

SF: Yeah, I imagine. What did, what did the crowd gather for? What were they looking at, or what were they trying to see at that particular spot?

GH: I don't know. I don't know why they gathered, but there were all kinds of groups, like large groups that were... they, they had a, it was something about a, they were trying to get some guys that were turning other people in, and that was one of the problems. Of course, this security guy, well, of course, he wasn't helping out any. He was, he's going around threatening people, I guess.

SF: This security guy was a white guy, huh?

GH: Pardon?

SF: The security guy was a white guy, right? He wasn't internal security, like another Japanese, he was a hakujin?

GH: Yeah, right.

SF: Were there women and kids in the crowd, too?

GH: Not too many. Mostly young people and, well, yeah. Mostly young people.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.