<Begin Segment 12>
RP: Tell us about the tofu job. Did you actually help make the tofu?
FN: No. We, a fellow by the name of Keets Takahashi and I, we delivered the tofu to the mess halls. And, that's where I met my wife's uncle there. And he was making tofu, but at that time I didn't know my wife. But I met this fellow and we got along good. And I didn't know my wife at all in the camp. 'Cause I was twenty, twenty-one and she was only thirteen or fourteen and, as I say, you never look at a small young kids as a girlfriend. So, and in a ways, she never when she was thirteen, fourteen look at another guy around twenty-one. They're like an old man to her. I mean, she knew my brothers and sisters but we never met. But, as I say, later on I found that she, that a man in the tofu factory was my wife's uncle.
RP: Did you, did you deliver the tofu every day to the mess halls or just...
FN: Well, yeah. There's so many mess hall that you, you don't cover it every day same, you cover just a third of the mess hall every other day or something like that. It's about over seventy years ago so you don't remember everything, you know.
RP: Right.
Off Camera: Can I ask a question about the mess hall? When you delivered food to the mess hall, did you do that... how many mess halls could you deliver with one truckload of food?
FN: Oh, I don't remember but maybe couple three blocks, two, three mess halls.
Off Camera: Okay, thank you.
FN: I'm sure that there was more than one truck --
RP: Delivering tofu?
FN: -- delivery trucks for the fruits and vegetables. It's been so long ago. You don't remember all that.
RP: How about the job at the camouflage net factory? You were a timekeeper?
FN: Yeah.
RP: Uh-huh. And, so you actually worked at the net factory? I mean you just kept people's time as they, as they...
FN: They worked, yeah. We just kept people's time and we sat around our butt doing nothing.
RP: What was, what was it like in those net factories there? What do you remember about the weaving and...
FN: Oh, I don't know. They were weaving. But, as I say, it's not like a job outside. You work in a camp so it's an easy... they just took their sweet time. But there were so many people that, that even if each one took their time, the output was there.
<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.