Densho Digital Archive - Joe Seto Interview (denshovh-sjoe

<Begin Segment 8>

EB: I want to back up a little bit, I have a few questions about the sports that you were involved in at Tule Lake. How much money did you earn each month as your, through your job in the sports activities section?

JS: Perhaps you can help me along. What were the three wage salaries?

EB: Well, it changed later on.

JS: At the beginning.

EB: Nine... nine, thirteen, maybe?

JS: And sixteen was the professionals? We're in the middle.

EB: So thirteen.

JS: Yeah. And since I was there only a month or two, I don't think I ever received a paycheck. I was there such a short time before I volunteered for the sugar beet harvest.

EB: Hmm. [Laughs] And you said you played baseball, what team were you on?

JS: It's the office where I worked. But we just had a pick-up team. We didn't belong to a more organized team, we only played two or three special games.

EB: Okay. Did you attend any of the other organized sports games?

JS: Oh, I was involved in tumbling. And we participated in the all-camp outdoor shows. I remember participating in one of those. So my experience in camp was relatively short in contrast to most people you probably interviewed.

EB: Yeah, yeah. And so when you went to harvest sugar beets, what wages did you earn?

JS: It was piecework. So since there were, in our crew there were about ten of us, and so we divided it in ten. The ten of us, and one was a female and she was our cook. So she got one share. And I recall, I think, after the sugar beet harvest, probably I maybe had about thirty dollars. And when I left camp, my mother gave me ten dollars, that's all the money I had.

EB: And how many hours a day did you work?

JS: Oh, we worked probably from seven to seven, weather permitting. Near the end it got very cold, I remember our hands frozen.

EB: Did you live in a barrack-style...

JS: No, it was just an old building, and there were two bedrooms, and four of us in each, and Shig Wakamatsu and his wife, they slept in the main room where we had our table where we ate, and the stove. Very crowded.

EB: I had another question... maybe it'll come back to me. Oh, I know what it was. So how many months were you harvesting sugar beets?

JS: Probably about a month.

EB: Oh, only a month? Okay.

JS: And what happened... we purchased the food in this one store, and this is all on credit. So at the end of the sugar beets, the farmer paid the groceries back, the food that we purchased, and then he'd give us the balance of the money which we split into ten shares.

EB: Okay.