<Begin Segment 6>

KL: Tell me more about your home in Rohwer. You said it was a barracks and there were two administrative families?

WJ: It was tarpaper covered.

DW: No, black army barracks with tarpaper on the outside.

WJ: Wood frame building, one story. Had a stove that burned coal for heat, central fan...

DW: No, you just said coal burning stove.

WJ: Heat radiating from it for most of the house.

KL: Were there multiple rooms in it?

WJ: Oh, yeah.

DW: It wasn't very big.

WJ: No, we had three rooms, bedroom, kitchen...

DW: We had living room, kitchen, I'm trying to figure out, yeah, I think all of us kids had a bedroom.

WJ: No.

DW: There wasn't room for three bedrooms.

WJ: You had a bedroom, Mother and Dad had a bedroom, and Jim and I shared a bedroom.

DW: No, we did that in Dyess. Dyess, that was...

WJ: There was one in the middle of back side of the house was Jim and I, the one on the far corner was yours, and one on the front corner was Mother and Dad.

DW: Do you realize how small those rooms had to be?

WJ: Yeah.

DW: I was going to show a picture of the barracks, they're just normal army barracks. They might be fifteen feet wide, but that's all.

KL: Who were your neighbors? It was set up like a duplex?

WJ: Oh, well, Tad Memorias lived in the other end with us for a while.

DW: Okay, where's that map of the camp that we found? But anyway, all of the Caucasian employees that were in the administration of the camp, and some of the army people, we all lived in a separate section of units, away from all the central blocks where all the Japanese lived.

WJ: There was one road that kind of divided the Japanese residency area...

DW: It's all in an open area and you're adjacent to each other.

KL: There was no fencing between you?

DW: No, there was no fencing between or anything. But the Japanese lived three families, I mean, they really were crowded, and we had two families to a barracks. Oh, this wouldn't help, would it? Anyway, overall, if that shows on the camera. The sections up here were with the administration and the army people, these blocks down in here were where the Japanese were. It was a central auditorium for gatherings, but each block had a, like a cube of barracks and in the center was a central mess hall, all the cooking was done centrally, had a laundry room and showers and all that. But so it was sort of isolated, but there were no fences, it was just roads.

KL: We were listening to an interview with the child of one of the administrators at Manzanar on the way here, and he remembers his parents saying, "Don't go into the Japanese section of the camp without an invitation," kind of stick to the administrative area. Were you guys back and forth a lot?

DW: Well, as kids we did more, but I remember we never went to activities in the Japanese section without an invitation. For instance, my dad took us... you guys didn't remember, maybe it was me, but I went to a Buddhist church gathering. We had our Methodist, I mean, our church, too. But we went to eat once in the mess hall, but we were invited. And I remember my dad told me when we got there, he says, "You will eat what you're served," and we did have raw fish, which I thought was horrible. And I remember there was an old gentleman who walked the gravel roads and picked up stones, we were talking about him the other day. He had the eye and polished 'em and made beautiful stones, polished stones, lapidary work. But we talked about him once, and were asking our dad, "Why is he picking up all these stones?" Well, he got permission from him, he asked him if he could bring us to visit him and see the stones. And we went to other people that did things, but I think he always got permission. I mean, it's polite.

WJ: Yeah, I didn't mean we'd visit, I walked around the road to get to the other end of the camp.

DW: Yeah, we were kids, we went everywhere.

WJ: We rode our bikes or whatever, went up and down all the roads.

DW: Right, we weren't segregated in any way. And the kids that you played with, I just remember, because I ended up playing a lot with a little Caucasian girl that lived there, because we were about the same size or age. But Tojo and Osimoto, they would spend more time in our house than they did theirs, I guess. We all just ran free.

WJ: We'd circle the camp trying the edges. [Laughs]

KL: Testing it, or just kind of exploring?

WJ: Just exploring. Kids... maybe a mile square, but at least a mile on each side. That's a lot of distance for a second grader to cover.

DW: But we always went to the places we weren't supposed to if you're kids, where the army parked all their trucks and stuff, we used to go flying around, that was forbidden, but we'd go explore.

WJ: By the time I was in third grade, they'd quit posting guards in the guard towers.

DW: That's what I was going to comment about, yeah.

WJ: We played in the guard towers.

KL: Oh, up in the platforms?

WJ: Yeah, each guard tower had a little platform and walked around this little, going inside.

DW: And we weren't supposed to then, because they were afraid we'd fall out and get hurt. But the one that did change dramatically by the time we left, and we were there, what, two years? Something like that. The Japanese were being allowed out of the camp, the guards were gone off the gates, they worked for the local plantations, farmers. The women... everybody, there was a lot more freedom. Everybody quit panicking, but it took them that first... I just remember the first impulse of fear.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.