<Begin Segment 14>

AL: Can I ask a question about Block 8? Block 8 and Block 9 are very close to each other. What is the difference in the demographic? Why was eight so much better? Was it not Terminal Island?

SO: Right, yes.

AL: And it made that big of a difference being just a few yards away?

SO: Yes.

MS: Yeah, that's what I thought it was, because of the, from one block to the next. Would you say most of the Terminal Islanders were in Block 9?

SO: Yes, that's what my friend says.

KL: Alisa and Jeff know those distributions better, but yeah, Block 9 was...

MS: Okay, that's why we left.

AL: All those yogores, right? To get away from the yogores?

SO: Yogores? Yeah. To get away from the yogores.

MS: [Laughs] That's good.

AL: They call themselves that.

SO: Exactly, yes, uh-huh.

MS: I'll remember you said that.

AL: Just one more question. We were talking about giving your mom a bad time, and I'm just trying to understand. Was it mostly women who were ostracizing her? Were the men also ostracizing her, or were the women ostracizing her because the men liked her too much?

SO: Yeah, probably.

MS: I don't think, I don't think men are like that as much as women, you know? In anything. Like women are cattier and you don't see guys standing around gossiping about people, I don't think, not as much as women. So I would say, yeah, it was the women.

KL: But you felt kind of a closeness between the community members when you were living in Terminal Island, is that right?

MS: Yeah, that's right.

KL: Do you think that changed with the removal?

MS: That's what doesn't make sense.

SO: I would think because our father was gone.

MS: Oh, yeah.

SO: I think that's what did it.

MS: I think that was a big factor.

SO: Yes.

MS: Because when he's there... but it made a difference. I think that's right.

SO: I think so, too.

KL: You said you remembered a friend from Terminal Island who was in Manzanar?

SO: Uh-huh. She was also at Compton, and I'm still friends with her today. I just saw her recently.

KL: Who is she?

SO: Grace Mizumoto. She's in my third grade class, the picture there. And she said to me when I saw her in June, "Do you remember the night of the riot?" And I go, "No." She goes, "Yes, you do. We were at the movies." She lived in Block 9, and she said, "We were at the movies, and your mom came over and said you have to leave right now." And we were saying we don't want to. She said, "Get up, we're leaving now." And that, she said, was the riot, the night of the riot or something. And I don't recall, but that's what she told me.

KL: Do you remember those... you've talked some about tensions between yourselves and people from Terminal Island. Do you remember other tensions or conflicts before the riot?

SO: No. Is that when they wanted the... it has to do with joining the service, right? The armed forces?

KL: Well, a very simple version is that there were kind of two different camps, one of which felt like the other one as too supportive of people going into camps and of the U.S. government, and a man who some people thought was too supportive of that was beaten, another man was arrested and blamed for the beating and was imprisoned in Independence and then brought back to the camp, and people were very angry with the two different positions. But I wanted to ask, there was a man from Terminal Island who was a big speaker in camp named Joseph Kurihara. I shouldn't say from Terminal Island, but I've heard about him from some people who fished from Terminal Island. Did your parents know Joseph Kurihara, or is that name familiar?

SO: Uh-uh.

MS: Never heard of him. There's Tatsumi, what's his first name?

SO: Yukio.

MS: Yuki Tatsumi, he was pretty...

SO: Active in the Terminal Island. In fact, he was the head of the Terminal Islanders club that they had formed after.

KL: Formed in Manzanar, the Terminal Island Club?

SO: No, I think it's after, in Long Beach, after the war, isn't it? That they formed that?

MS: In fact, he was the president of the Terminal Islander 'til recently. He's in his nineties now, so somebody else took over.

KL: And you knew him in Manzanar? When did you start to know him?

SO: I think in Long Beach after the war.

MS: In fact, he was our neighbor when we were in Long Beach. Lived couple of doors away, very nice guy.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.