<Begin Segment 13>

WJ: When you got a chance to look inside their little apartments...

DW: Oh gosh, I got to go in a few of them, and they're always...

WJ: They weren't given anything like this table. All they had was furniture they built out of crates, the things that were brought in the camp, they were little bit, picked up loose lumber, but they had to build their own furniture. They didn't have a chair unless they built it.

DW: Yeah, and you know, I don't know, and I don't remember now whether Dad's report ever said, they never gave them furniture? Did they have mattresses? What happened? Somebody had to provide this.

WJ: I think they did get a mattress, but they didn't get any bed. If they had something that held it up off the floor, they built it themselves.

DW: But they were more of a futon on the floor society.

JJ: I read... again, this is not memory, but reading somewhere, they had a shop -- they were very involved in building, actually, the barracks themselves.

DW: Well, yeah, they had to do that.

WJ: The first crew the government had to --

JJ: They hired laborers for that also, but they had a shop, and I think the government provided the materials. But they were very gifted in this, a lot of them, in their carpentry skills. So we helped provide them the means to build their own...

DW: I started saying, I remember when they had the shops, the woodworking shops, yeah, that were built in the camp.

WJ: What I remember, part of this, we should have furnished 'em a better grade of lumber to build with. Because a lot of times they had to just pick up scraps from the barrack construction, you know, the sawed-off ends. They didn't waste anything, they would pick those up, and they'd make a little shelf or something. We should have given them...

DW: We could have done a lot more.

WJ: ...little better lumber. We were raising lumber, we were cutting trees down every day.

DW: They cut trees off of, yeah... well, part of that was farmland, but yeah, they cut trees off of that for the camp.

WJ: The camp was ten thousand acres.

DW: I know, but I mean...

WJ: We had a big belt of woods around there.

DW: Well, and then after they started letting the Japanese got out there, they had wood crews... well, actually, before they let 'em out, 'cause it was in the camp, they could go cut wood for their stoves to use. We used coal.

WJ: They supposedly had to.

DW: Oh, work projects.

WJ: They didn't know anything about cutting down trees, or cutting firewood or splitting wood. They were just not accustomed to anything, they weren't very efficient in doing it, and paid 'em the same pay per hour as a buck private in the army got. They weren't too interested in working too hard. So he said it would have simpler to just burn coal everywhere, forgot the wood project.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.