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RP: Did your mom or dad have any creative outlets?
MW: Have what?
RP: Were they creative musically or artistically or...
MW: Well there's a thing called shigin, and I mean if the Americans, when the Americans hear that they absolutely just go bonkers, including me. I mean it just seems so... not, not, the word's not harmonious, but it's, it's just different what we're used to hearing. I mean you go to South America and their music or no matter what country you go to it's... but that music, I don't know if you're familiar with that shigin, wow. Yeah.
RP: So, your, your mother was into shigin?
MW: My, my dad. So he sang. So then he would take me and that's how I got to learn odori, which is Japanese dancing. So, I did learn to do Japanese dancing. And right after the war this, at the playground at, at the Evergreen playground, they used to have little, like entertainments or something. And so the librarian at the, at the library in East L.A. she somehow found out I did Japanese dancing so she says, "Would you dance for us?" And I said, "Okay." I think she came back and she says, "Well, they said they don't, they're not gonna take you because you're Japanese and we fought, they were our enemies." So I was, I was astounded because it was several years after the war. It was like maybe three years or something. But still the stigma was there.
RP: Did you dance before the war at all?
MW: No.
RP: You started afterwards.
MW: Yeah, I was a little girl.
RP: Did you attend a Japanese language school as a child?
MW: For a little while, just like everybody else, but we just couldn't stand it. In camp they had, they had and I didn't, once we went to camp. They did have it though. But I forgot it all.
RP: You spoke, before you went to camp though you spoke Japanese at home?
MW: Right.
RP: With your parents.
MW: But my sisters of course were older and they, they went to school. Yeah, but I remember I went to school that next week or something and the teacher says, "Well you'd better not come to school. I don't think you should come anymore, Yasuko. Because," she says, "It might be hurtful or somebody might harm you or something."
RP: That was after Pearl, the attack on Pearl Harbor?
MW: Right.
RP: Oh.
MW: Attack on, on Pearl Harbor. That was a Sunday. But my dad came home and said... Oh, you know that, we'd been going to this place. And I remember my mom crying because they said they were gonna separate the aliens from the, from us kids. And she was really panicky. But then she found out that we're gonna all be together. So she said, "Oh I don't care where we go as long as we're together." So anyway, we got on the bus and I remember the bus, the stench. My sister got motion sickness. And so she... and then it would kind of, had an effect... what do you call that effect?
RP: Oh, domino?
MW: Yeah. Everybody... and it was terrible. The smell was awful in the bus. Yeah. But we got there and it was, it was pitch black I remember when the bus stopped and we got off and it was just... and windy. I know everybody says windy. Of course, you know what that's like, living up there. Oh my gosh. I can never forget that wind. And my mother used to put toilet paper inside her nose. I often wondered why. But now I know why. She had an allergy and they didn't have antihistamines back there. And her nose would constantly run. Yeah. So today I go oh wow, we pop our pills if, if this hurts or that hurts. So, in camp I really felt for the older people. I mean, we were young and fortunately our parents were there to take care of us. But it saddens me that they went through that.
<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.