Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Willie K. Ito Interview
Narrator: Willie K. Ito
Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier
Location: Los Angeles, California
Date: December 5, 2013
Densho ID: denshovh-iwillie-01-0012

<Begin Segment 12>

KL: Would you compare... I'd like to hear about the school in Topaz. Sometimes it's easiest to compare things to something else, so maybe how it compared to your school in San Francisco.

WI: Well, of course, when I was going to school, American school, it was ethnically mixed. And then when I went to Japanese school, it was a different discipline. But now in camp, the class is all Japanese kids, but we didn't have to maintain that strict discipline as the Japanese school, so that was a change. So now we were all kids just going to kindergarten and first grade and whatever, and had a looser atmosphere. But the kids were all Japanese kids.

KL: What was the school?

WI: The school was designated in one of the barracks. The way the camp was laid out, we had a mess hall, and it was all community. And then, of course, the bathrooms and the latrines were all community. And then one of the barracks was designated for school, and I think each room was a different grade level. I think that's how it was.

KL: Any teachers stand out, or any memorable friends or lessons?

WI: Well, see, we had Caucasian teachers that were recruited from the outside, or those that volunteered and wanted to come into camp, because they had to live in camp. So there was a number of Caucasian teachers that came in. And then a lot of the teaching assistants were young Japanese students that were taking teaching in college. So they became my teaching assistants. Some of those that had full credentials were full time teachers. So I thought the school, thinking back, was very good. We did learn a lot, and it was disciplined. We got report cards and our parents knew what we were up to, you know. And again, I kept taking art classes. Kids of my age, we had groups that, like Shig, that was very athletic. They were always out to play ball and play some sort of game. But I would love to go home and start drawing.

Now, one of the things that I did, I mentioned the Sears and Roebuck catalog. So every three months they would send us new ones. So with the old expired ones, on the edges of the margin I would make a little animation and then you flip it. So I made my flipbooks, which was my first or early foray into the art of animation. So that's how I amused myself.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.