<Begin Segment 10>

KL: This is tape two of a continuing interview with the Miyoshi sisters in 2013. We had just started talking some about Manzanar. And Kazuko, to back up a little bit about first impressions, you wrote you had some first impressions of the camp. What sticks in your mind, your first impressions?

KM: How big and tall the Sierras were. When you're a little kid and you're looking up, it's just enormous. And then I remember telling my mother, "We're going to go up to the mountain there." And she goes, "Okay, you do that." And, of course, after a block or two, you're tired. So we came back, but that's what I remember. That, and a lot of Japanese in camp, so I didn't know if we were in Japan, or where we were. Those two things struck my mind, is the vastness of the mountain and being that little in camp. I don't know what we were doing, must be in Japan.

KL: What were your impressions of the mountains? Sounds like they made you curious, Kazuko.

YI: You know, I thought they were huge, too, but I remember a man died painting, the painter guy or somebody, he went up in those mountains. After that, I didn't want to go to the mountains, 'cause I thought that, I related it to death. But I remember, and he was an artist, and I guess he stayed too late, and you know, you're not supposed to be leaving the camp. So he must have snuck out and I remember they found him, and he was gone. So I didn't want to see those mountains again. That was my memory of those.

KL: What about the climate? What are your memories of the climate?

KM: Hot and freezing, yeah. In the summertime everybody would be roasting hot, and my brother and his other friends would go out into the, outside the gate and go swimming, because they would dam up the creek, Bairs Creek, and cool off.

KL: Did you go there?

KM: Yeah, we went. But the guys were always swimming, and it wasn't very deep, they just... how wide can it be, but you could dam it up. And then in the winter it was... we weren't accustomed to snow at all, so that was fun. And they had a... those rings that the gymnasts used, they had one set, I think, of the rings, and then next to it, that was like a slide, and they packed it with snow and we could slide down this thing. And it looks so high, but when we look back at the pictures, they're not high, they just seemed that way to a kid.

KL: Where was that slide?

KM: It was in the middle of a block.

YI: In the middle.

KM: In Block 8.

YI: Yeah, in Block 8. They had kind of like these, you know, like that, and then a thing going across, and there were rings hanging, and there was the place where they did the slide, and I think they had a rope that they could exercise.

KM: Merry-go-round, not merry-go-round, I guess it is merry-go-round, you could go round and around, someone would push you.

YI: Oh, I don't remember that. But I remember that tall thing, and then they made this slide into a snow slide so in the winter... but you know, in the summertime, we were lucky, because my father made that shaved ice. And he had made, in a piece of wood, he made a blade, and he would just take that ice and go back and forth, and underneath, he'd have a bowl. And my mother had syrup --

KL: Where'd he get the ice?

KM: He made it.

YI: You had a refrigerator, and you don't put the ice cube tray in, you leave that out, and you've got a chunk of ice, and we were popular, needless to say. And I don't know where my mother got the syrup, must have got... she brought it, because we did have it when we were home here.

KM: She made beans.

YI: Beans, the azuki beans, and they call it kintoki.

KL: She did that in Manzanar?

YI: Uh-huh.

KL: Did she do that in your barrack, in your apartment?

YI: Yeah.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.