Densho Digital Archive - Sumiko Yamauchi Interview (denshovh-ysumiko

<Begin Segment 19>

WP: What were your impressions of the physical landscape?

SY: Physical... meaning I hated the walk. Especially when we, you were in school and you had to walk all the way up the hill to the mess hall. And that's bad enough as it is in the summer, but when that wind is blowing, you have to walk to and then back. That was miserable, you couldn't stop by the other mess halls to eat because you were assigned to a certain table. I don't think... at the beginning you hated the idea of having to use a community bathroom, but after a while, you get used to it. And at the beginning, I didn't like it because everything in the bathroom was open. There was no stall or a toilet seat, I think that was the... but you know, after you lived there, and like I said, if you fight it, it becomes irritating. But if you accept it, you know, that's the way it is. And they're not going to do anything about it, okay, so be it, is how most of the people were. There were some people that had these little things where they hammer it up and they hooked up the sheet that came down, you know. But after a while I thought, "How ridiculous." If you had to take a shower and put all these little curtains around you, everybody's standing naked, you get used to it. In fact, when I came here and I was taking swimming lessons over here at the Plunge, you know, it's an open stall, everybody takes a shower and nobody's trying to hide anything. Yours may be a little bigger than mine, but it's okay. [Laughs] You get along.

WP: So you were at Manzanar a fairly long time, 'til June of 1945. In what ways did Manzanar change over time physically, but also as a community?

SY: As a community, more active things were happening. You were more familiar with this, familiar with the different people you met, different people, you had different interests. When you were in school, there's always something going on. And I was never active in any of the... but I was there to participate. And actually, camp wasn't all that bad. I can't really complain. If somebody was getting more than me, I think I would have complained, but nobody got anything more than I did.

WP: Is there a certain event or memory or person that you haven't talked about from your experience at Manzanar that sticks out in your mind?

SY: Uh-uh.

WP: And so your sister left camp before the rest of your family. Where did she go?

SY: She went to Chicago.

WP: And what made her decide to go to Chicago?

SY: Because there were, all the young kids her age were going, you know. And if you had the money go to, you can go. You just couldn't go back to Los Angeles, because there was an area from the ocean to inland so many miles, you couldn't go back to. And beyond that you can go. You can always go to Chicago, you can go to Denver, you can go to Arizona. But certain, on the coast, I think, they had an area where you could not go at that time. But later on it opened up and anybody could go anywhere, if you could find somewhere to go. And in those days, Los Angeles was one of the bigger cities were a lot of people from the country went to the big cities to get bigger, better jobs. So therefore we had nowhere to go, unless you had a friend or you owned the property, and we didn't.

WP: What did your sister do in Chicago?

SY: She worked the candies. Remember Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, she worked in that company. She used to always say about sugar, all the sugar she could have, you know. [Laughs] Because we were so rationed in the camp.

WP: Yeah, that must have been a nice place to work after the war and no access to sugar.

SY: Well, I often wonder where they got the sugar because it was so rationed. They tell me that in Los Angeles you couldn't buy any canned food because, unless you had a ration ticket or stamp or something. So since we were, we didn't have that problem, we don't know what it feels like to have to buy a can of tomato, and you ran out of tickets, so then you couldn't buy any more.