<Begin Segment 17>

RP: Did your father work in camp?

FN: I don't know. I don't think so, I think he liked to play go and shogi so he was, to him he, he used to go to the place and he was pretty good at it so a lot of people want to take lessons from him.

RP: Oh, go and shogi?

FN: Yeah. But he never got money for that, I mean, he enjoyed whether he's teaching or playing. To him, that was his life.

RP: So, a number of people talk about their camp experience and how it split up their family or broke up the family. What was the situation with your family? Do you feel it broke it, broke up your family or brought your family closer together?

FN: I think it brought the family closer together.

RP: How? How did it do that?

FN: Well, you think more of each other than... I don't know, I think it just brought us closer together. But in the camp, I mean, everybody had their own friends and my mother used to have a shamisen so she had her group and my dad went to shogi and go and all that so I mean, everybody had their doings.

RP: Their little past times.

FN: Yeah, yeah.

RP: Did you, did you date any, any girls in camp?

FN: No. I did once and that, that parents said, "Be sure and bring her home by ten o'clock." and the dance and stuff don't start 'til after eight so about an hour's time I took her back and then I went back to the dance. That's the only time I dated a girl and said bring her back by ten o'clock. I thought, hell. But I just didn't want to be tied down in the camp so I never had any girlfriends or anything.

RP: Can you describe the men's latrine to us? How the, how the latrine was set up?

FN: Well, it was just wide open and the men's urinal was just one long... and then no privacy but once, then they finally put a partition between the two toilets. And where you wash your, brush your teeth was one long...

RP: Another long trough?

FN: Trough, yeah.

RP: With the spigots?

FN: Yeah.

RP: And the shower area...

FN: It's just wide open.

RP: Just wide open.

FN: Yeah.

RP: No...

FN: But I was used to that 'cause in the high school, men's shower was just like that so, I mean, I was used to that. I think a lot of women, they waited 'til midnight or something to go take a shower because then nobody'd be around. One thing is in a camp you never had to worry about girls being attacked or anything like that, I mean, it was safe. No matter what hours of the day nobody worried about people being attacked by other people. So even the women and girls, they go out at night and they don't have to worry about it.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.