<Begin Segment 9>

DW: Do you remember when we used to, we had a little, like, rec. hall in our area, and that's, it wasn't very big, but it's where we saw the newsreels and gatherings.

WJ: Movie if they had one. You going to bring up the community dances we had there?

DW: Yes, because there weren't many kids, and so the parents, they wanted to entertain us, so we'd have dances. Well, first place, you had a four year old dancing with a ten year old, and you have girls with girls... we didn't have the right things, mix. But yeah, do you remember that?

WJ: I think Mother was probably instrumental in setting that up.

DW: Well, she probably played the piano for us, too. We used records.

WJ: And, of course, Daddy used to dance with everyone that was there. If you went to the dance, he danced with everyone.

KL: Your dad did, you said?

WJ: Yes.

DW: And they had dances, camp-wide, later. But that didn't go quite as well, because a lot of the older Japanese, they were too conservative.

WJ: Reserved. But the thing I remember --

DW: The kids weren't.

WJ: We had one every...

DW: Month or something.

WJ: One every month, Friday or something every month.

DW: On Fridays.

WJ: Any rate, the last dance, the boy had to take the girl he was dancing with home.

DW: I didn't remember that.

KL: Did you plan strategically for the last dance?

WJ: No. I didn't care who I walked home or if I walked somebody home, it doesn't matter to me. It did in one way because there were two streets that we lived on. We lived on this end of this street, and this girl had to walk home, they were on the other end of the other street. And so we had to walk around the block to get home, but there's no streetlights, so it's dark.

DW: It's very dark. [Laughs]

WJ: And I remember thinking that this was the worst thing that ever happens to me, had to make that walk in the dark by myself.

DW: Dark by myself, yeah.

KL: What were you worried about?

WJ: Boogers.

DW: The boogeyman.

WJ: The boogeyman getting me. I wasn't worried about Japanese, if that's what you're wondering, no, I wasn't.

KL: No, I just wondered.

DW: You know, I thought about another thing --

WJ: You hear your own footsteps because you're walking on gravel, it sounds like somebody walking behind you. So you walk a little faster, they get --

DW: Well, you remember the games we used to play up around, we're out there doing this stuff, but one of them, I remember, we're looking for spies, and somebody was trying to --

KL: You kids would play with each other?

DW: Yeah. And the other kids around, but worrying about... it was funny because I remember one time we were worrying about finding some tracks that looked like they might have been the rising sun, so maybe there were some Japanese spies getting into the camp. We weren't worried about people in the camp, this was a foreigner of some kind. I thought that was weird, too, they were thinking about it. But at the time it didn't seem strange.

KL: That's what was on your mind, I'm sure.

DW: Yeah, we were thinking, "This is the enemy, this is the Japanese symbol," but that wasn't, it wasn't a camp person, this was a foreigner that was going to break in to the camp, I don't know. Children.

KL: Were the dances, did people come from... did Japanese American kids come to the dances?

WJ: At first it was strictly just the Caucasian personnel.

DW: It was just in our little block.

WJ: And people from within the camp, nobody from out of the camp. And I really don't know if it ever changed anything about outside the camp.

DW: I don't think so either. But later, it did relax a lot, because we had a lot of Japanese teenagers, and they started having dances in the big gymnasium.

WJ: We went to dances in the gymnasium, yeah.

DW: Yeah. The one that we had there, the ones that we had there in the Caucasian compound or whatever you want to call it, was a very small building and was where we'd see newsreels or have any gatherings, a potluck or a dance or something. But they had bigger gatherings in the big auditorium or what it was, community center.

WJ: Community center.

KL: And you went to some of those, too, you said?

DW: Yes. That's where we went to movies a lot.

WJ: Went to movies a lot.

DW: And I remember watching, or getting to go by, I could hear the music, but we were too young to go to the dances, because that was for the teenagers, you know. We weren't that big.

KL: Did they seem excited?

DW: Yeah, we kind of wanted to go. Even in high school, now, see, I didn't get to experience that, but I remember they had like the proms, and they had a queen and all this stuff, you know, they did the usual high school things.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.