Densho Digital Archive - Joe Seto Interview (denshovh-sjoe

<Begin Segment 7>

EB: And you said that after Pinedale you went to Tule Lake. And what was that trip like up to Tule Lake?

JS: Another train trip like we took to go from Tacoma to Pinedale, same type of train trip.

EB: And when you arrived at Tule Lake, was it morning or evening?

JS: I think it was midday.

EB: Midday. And then what happened once you arrived? What did you have to do?

JS: Well, then we had to decide who our neighbors, who we'd like to have as neighbors. So we elected to have the same neighbors as we had in Pinedale, name was Shig Wakamatsu. He was a newlywed the day of the evacuation, and we knew him very well, of course. Subsequently he turned out to be the national JACL... you've heard of the JACL? National JACL president. He lived in Chicago. At the time of the war, he was a pre-med student, at that time called College of Puget Sound, it's a Methodist college. So he was fortunate when... that must have been in 1943, he got a job at Lever Brothers, the soap company. He worked as a chemist, and then he was very active in the JACL. He was a civil rights activist. And Lever Brothers, when he was president, being president, required him to travel throughout the United States, and Lever Brothers did not dock him for, during the days that he missed his work. So Lever Brothers was very generous.

EB: Do you know where he would travel?

JS: Well, he traveled to the various JACL offices such as the ones in Washington, D.C., and New York. Salt Lake City was the main office.

EB: And what else do you remember about your arrival at Tule Lake?

JS: Well, everybody was able to be employed, and I think you know about what the levels of employment, the salary is, you've probably heard from others. So since I was very active in athletics in high school, I worked in the special activities office where we organized sports events for the people in the camps. I know I umpired in softball games, reorganized the games and schedule, played a little baseball there. So I worked there in the community activities, sports activities. Then about September, the sugar company says, you're probably aware, in the western states... the sugar farmers, sugar beet farmers had no one to harvest their crops. And so they persuaded the federal government to allow the sugar companies to recruit sugar beet workers to harvest the sugar beet crops. So I jumped at the opportunity because I wanted my freedom. And that means I left the camp. And one of the ten individuals was Shig Wakamatsu again, and his wife, and about nine other men. And we went to the Montana-North Dakota border and we harvested sugar beets. All but Shig and his wife and George Watanabe and myself refused to return. We just stayed there, everybody else returned to camp, because we wanted our freedom. And I went east further to Minot, North Dakota, which is the largest city. We were in a town of probably five hundred people, there were no employment opportunities. And we got an unofficial document to travel out of the Western Defense Command, that was, as you know, as far east as Montana. And George Watanabe and myself, we went to Minot, North Dakota, to try to seek employment. And we were there about two days and we got a telegram from the FBI saying that we don't have the official permission to leave the Western Defense Command, and so we will return to Sidney, Montana, the main city of the sugar beet company, to haul the sugar.

And I should interject one experience we had. We left, it was Minot, North Dakota, and we went to Williston, North Dakota, and we checked in a hotel. And we went out to eat, and we came back, and the police were waiting for us to return. And I went to the room and George went to another room to visit Shig Wakamatsu who was also on that trip. And the police came up to the room and knocked on the door, and George Watanabe had the radio on. And they inspected the radio, seeing if it had the shortwave, presumably sending messages back to Japan. And that was a bad experience, of course, unexpected. And then we went on to Minot, North Dakota, there to receive this telegram. So instead of being arrested by the FBI, the Holly Sugar Company representatives were aware of that, so they drove to Minot, North Dakota, and returned us to Sidney, Montana. That was an all-night journey.