Densho Digital Archive - Rose Tanaka Interview (denshovh-trose

<Begin Segment 20>

AL: -- Lynch with Rose Tanaka on September, excuse me, August 9th, 2001. This is tape three of an oral history with Rose. And you were talking about how people spent their leisure time and the game of go.

RT: Well, many of the older men liked to play the game of go, which is a board game much like, well, looks like checkers, but you use black and white discs, and it's a matter of turning them over. But it's a very intriguing game, and demanding, and so they liked to play go competitions. But speaking of what older people did, many of them were very artistic, and I remember that they would go out and find pieces of scrap wood, mostly twigs or pieces of root and twisted trees, and they would polish them off. This gave them a pastime, so they could use their time productively. And they would scrape off all the outer bark and polish them up, and made these very nice, maybe they would be table legs or furnishings for the house. And it was something that men could do. Women did things like crocheting and paper flower making and that kind of thing, but men also found ways to pass their time productively, especially the older people who had no work to do. And having been gardeners and that kind of thing, they appreciated the form that, natural forms of plants and such.

AL: I'm sorry.

RT: Yeah, go ahead.

AL: I'm sorry. Did your father or mother do any sort of arts, crafts, things like that?

RT: No. My father wasn't a crafty person as such, but he liked to do things like wring people's clothes out. [Laughs] Well, I can't really remember much about what he did with his free time.

AL: See, now people pay big money to go to the gym to build muscles, and he was just probably building, exercising his muscles.

RT: Well, he worked hard on the farm there.

AL: What was your mess hall like in Block 30?

RT: Well, it was just a mess hall. I felt that it was a little sad that we had to eat in a mess hall because it sort of broke down the family relationships. The young people all gathered at their own table, the teenagers and other kids went to eat together. So some parts of the mess hall were for the older, the grandparents and the mothers with the babies and that kind of thing. So the siblings were always off seeking their own friendships, and so it really sort of broke up the family structure. But no, it was all right. I mean, what can you say about a mess hall where we all go and troop in and eat forgettable meals.

AL: Well, some mess halls had actual people who had been cooks. And then other mess halls had people who had been truck mechanics.

RT: Well, that's true. And you could tell that, which mess halls were the best, because we had young teenagers that checked out all the mess halls. And they would roam the camp and find the best mess hall, and they would go and eat there. They would find the ones that they liked, and so they had their choice. It's like picking out the best restaurant.

AL: Until they came up with the little tickets that said you had to stay in the block. Did... who would you eat your meals with?

RT: Well, with my family.

AL: So your family stayed together at mealtime? And that would not be typical then from what...

RT: Well, yes, because I did form friendships with other people, the girls in my block. And as I recall, we would go to eat together and we were all at the same table. So it was a group of families that ate together.