<Begin Segment 5>

RP: Did, you said that your mother would spend a lot of time in bed at Amache.

TA: Yes, she just got up just to go to the...

RP: Mess hall?

TA: Mess hall, and go to use the restroom facilities. And then eventually they said her TB had reoccurred, which is not really surprising in that dusty area, and so they said she would have to be in an isolated area of the medical facility of the camp, but she could not go back to California. She could not, so they just, I don't know where she was. I don't think that I even really saw her after that.

RP: After she was put in the hospital?

TA: Yes, right. And so they said, "Well, you can't stay there all alone. We'll have to put you some place." And so they said, "Well, we'll put you back with the Yoshimunes." And they were across the street, so they had to make, I think, a new kind of bed for me, or moved it. I have no idea, or no recollection of why I was put back over there, but it must've been very difficult in a room that was built for two, to have three people in there. But I moved back there, and I do not know who went back into the unit that I was in.

RP: That you were in.

TA: Yeah.

RP: What about the Yoshimunes' daughter?

TA: Yes, by then she was married and she was living also in the same block, and so they had a daughter and I had kind of done some babysitting for them while I was living with them in the Seinan area before.

RP: So you did that there too?

TA: Uh-huh. And so then I did know them, and again, that was fortunate that, I think they were in block, barrack 10, so we were still very close together. So I did know some people.

RP: They were really your, your family.

TA: I consider them my foster parents.

RP: Foster parents. And Mr. Yoshimune, tell me a little bit more about him as a person.

TA: Well, he was in the grocery, I mean, the produce section. He used to get up -- before the war, this is -- very early, around four o'clock, in order to pick up produce to bring to the market, and then he'd take a nap in the afternoon. And then after the war, I don't recall what he did during the time, but I think he did some wood carving and stuff, because I think their daughter kept one of the things and gave it to the museum that he had carved out at the time, because I don't think he, I don't know if he had a position, a job or anything during the, during the internment.

RP: During the time he spent at Amache.

TA: Yes.

RP: Now, did Mrs...

TA: She worked at the hospital area as an aide of some sort. And I just went to school most of the time, but if there was a plus for me of school it was that I developed a whole lot of friends that I really had not had before but didn't realize that. And so, but the most jarring thing about the whole school thing was to find these kids who were talking Japanese to one another. That had never, ever happened in my whole school life experience, and we said, "What's with these people? Don't they talk English to one another?" But that was, that was how they communicated. And we found out that they were from either Colusa or some places that we had never heard of in central California. And we even learned that there was one school district in California that was segregated. It was Walnut Grove, and where the, only Japanese were all segregated to go to that school. But we thought, "Oh my, these are country hicks. They are, they're so backward. They don't know English, they don't speak properly." We thought we were so superior, and we thought, "We'll never associate with them."

RP: But then, on the other hand, what did they think of you?

TA: And they thought, "These are kind of like," I don't think they called us city slickers, but I think they thought that we thought we were so superior. We thought, "They think they're so superior." They did not like it. And some of our, at that time, I think part of the clothing identified you, and some of the boys had pants that were like zoot suits, where the pants were wide and they came, tucked in. So they thought they were the zoot-suiters, and so they said, they did not like those people. [Laughs] And so there was not very much association at the beginning. In fact, it was really kind of division. But then once you got to school, they didn't say, "Alright, if you are from Los Angeles you can be in this classroom, and if you're from Merced you can be in this classroom." They had us mixed up, and so then you had to kind of associate with each other, and then we got to realize that we were in the same situation together. There was no library. The teachers were, seemed, some of them seemed to be okay with this; some seemed to be as uncomfortable as we were in the whole situation.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.