<Begin Segment 12>

KL: This is tape two of a continuing interview here with Shiuko Sakai. And I should have said that we are in Portland, Oregon, in the Doubletree Hotel in the first one. And we were talking during our change of tapes and break a little bit about your painting in Minidoka, and I wondered if you would tell us about the paintings that you did in Minidoka.

SS: Well, they're not great paintings. I liked to paint, so I just looked out the window, maybe look out and see the canal, go out there and paint a little canal scene. Or I'd look out the, towards the other areas, I see the barbed wire fence, I'd see a guard tower in the distance and then I'd... part of the barrack next to me, next to our barracks. So I have a corner of that. Then it was, I think, close to sundown, and the sky was a bright orange, it was pretty. So I painted that. And other times I'd look out where the canal was and I'd see beautiful skies. I didn't paint that, but I just liked to look around and see different things that I could paint.

KL: Did you have a teacher in camp, or you just did it on your own?

SS: No. I always liked to paint when I was, from grade school. It's just one of those things. I didn't have a teacher, no. I mean, I took art in school, that was it.

KL: I wanted, you reminded me, too, of the Kubotas who were your neighbors, and I wondered if they were involved in gardening at Minidoka, or what your memories of gardens at Minidoka were.

SS: Gardening?

KL: Uh-huh.

SS: Well, Minidoka, no, we didn't have areas we can garden that I recall. But in "Camp Harmony," in Puyallup, people planted flowers right outside their entrance. I don't know where they got the seeds.

KL: There's, in some of the pictures that you have of your brother, it looks like there's some landscaped area in front of your mess hall.

SS: See, as I said, Mr. Kubota, who's a, Kubota Gardens in Seattle, he may have had something to do with it.

KL: But there was a garden or a landscaped area around your...

SS: Around the mess hall, yes. Beautifully done. So he may have... maybe he had something... but you told me that somebody was in charge of landscaping?

Off camera: No, Anna Tamura, National Parks.

SS: Oh, the National Parks?

KL: So now she works with restoration and gardens.

Off camera: She's doing a study on it.

KL: How did people react to that garden coming? What did you think of their being a garden and a landscaped area by the mess hall?

SS: I thought it was nice.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.