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KL: You, I wanted to ask also about your siblings relocating out of the camp. You sort of touched on that, but I wondered if they left from Jerome or if that was in Rohwer?

SM: As soon as we went to Rohwer, they left.

KL: Would you tell us about how and why you went to Rohwer?

SM: Well, I assumed that the people were gradually leaving the camps and so they were trying to consolidate and save money. But I told Mr. Ellington, who bought the Jerome property, that that was the reason why we moved to Rohwer. He said, "Oh no, no, that wasn't the case at all. The government needed a secure prison camp for the German POWs, and so they decided that Rohwer, Jerome was a secure camp, and so they moved everybody out of Jerome." And that's what he, that's what he was told and that's what he said.

KL: How did Rohwer and Jerome compare and contrast to each other?

SM: I think it's, they're all the same. All the camps are so, it was a forest area, so it was pretty much the same. The people we lived with in Block 25 in Rohwer were mostly from Lodi-Stockton area, and so they were new people. They weren't the same ones in Block 43. I don't remember anybody from Block 43 moving to Block 25, since when we moved to Rohwer, I think they just put us in whatever barracks were available, so we got scattered all over. But I was, I got acquainted with the Lodi-Stockton people.

KL: What was that like?

SM: It was nice. I mean, they were valley people, too, and they were, they had a softball team so, the younger ones had a softball team of people from Lodi-Stockton. So I got to, we got to be real good friends. And then I took the church in Stockton, so I knew a lot of those people. That was nice. Let's see, I just spent one year in Rohwer, the ninth grade, and met, of course, a lot of new people, because I don't recall anybody, very many people that I knew in Jerome. Course, we were all put in different homerooms so, according to our alphabetical name, so in my homeroom there was nobody that I remembered from Jerome, so most of 'em were all new. In school, in Jerome we had some good teachers and some teachers that we also made fun of, and in Rohwer my homeroom teacher was Miss Avery, and one day she told me, "Saburo, you ought to be a social worker." And that shocked me because I was shy and I wasn't about to be interested in anything like that. She said, "You like sports?" I would say, "Yeah, I sure do." But she said social work, I thought it strange and here I ended up sort of in that field, and I don't know why she said that. But one of my favorite teachers there was an English teacher, Miss Ziegler. I liked her because she had us, when we read the book Treasure Island she made it into a game and asking questions and answers. We had chosen two teams and one, the person asking the question on the other team was the pitcher and we were the batters, and so the question would come to us, if you answered the question we'd get to first base and we'd play a baseball game like that, and that was fun. And then, of course, I used to stutter so much I could never give an oral report, so playing that kind of game was fun. If I had to give an oral report I'd probably thought she was the worst teacher I ever had. [Laughs]

KL: Tell us where Lily and Kats and Tosh relocated to and what they did.

SM: They went to Naperville, Illinois and a seed company, and before, when we decided to go back to California they came back and joined us. But Tosh and Lily went one month ahead, in March, to fix up the place, make sure everything was ready for us, and a month later we joined them, in April.

KL: All three of them went to Naperville? Or did Lily --

SM: No, Lily went to Detroit, Michigan. She worked, I think she worked as a housemaid. That was a common job for the Japanese people, women.

KL: Did they tell you anything about their experiences in Naperville and Detroit?

SM: Well, very little. Very little. Yeah, I don't know, it's so strange, we didn't talk about things like that.

KL: What was it like for you to have them leave?

SM: It didn't make any difference to me. There was nothing going on to keep them, keep us together. I was playing all the time with my friends and they were with their friends or their work. My brother Kats worked in the kitchen in Jerome, and my brother Tosh worked in the warehouse. I think Miyo told me, 'cause I don't recall Tosh mentioning it, but I think I might've sensed it, his friends were among those being influenced by, I think by Reverend Kai, the Buddhist priest, who was sort of telling them they shouldn't take all this sitting down. So he was very vocal, and then his, the group that he was mostly working with were Kibei who had a stronger self-image and sense of who they were, so they would be very open to Reverend Kai's guidance about not being a "yes-yes" person, kowtowing and accommodating the majority. So he had a, I don't know how large a group, but he had, he was quite influential in a group from Jerome that said "no-no," and they ended up in Tule Lake. I think I mentioned, I don't know what happened to him. I should sort of look it up and see.

KL: Yeah, I don't know either. I'll have to, we'll have to compare notes on what we find.

SM: But I remember his name was Reverend Kai, K-A-I.

KL: Yeah, and he was a Buddhist minister.

SM: Priest, uh huh, from Fresno. So Tosh's close friends, since a lot of them were from Caruthers and Fresno area, he sort of got rejected because he didn't go along with this "no-no" thing. And Tosh was a typical quiet American, two hundred percent American and didn't rock the boat or anything. So he didn't agree, so they sort of shunned him after that.

KL: Are you aware if any of them returned to the Fresno area in years later?

SM: Yeah, they came back, but they never talked about it.

KL: Were they, did they have problems when they came back? Or were they reintegrated into the community?

SM: Well, I'm not aware of that. Right after high school I moved outside of town, so I don't know anything that might have happened since then, but all I know is they, like most of those who went to Tule Lake, didn't want to be identified as having been in Tule Lake. It was, for them it was a shame, because the Japanese community put them down for being, unjustly calling them disloyal and traitors, which wasn't the case at all. But that's the stigma that they had.

KL: [To MH] Do you have any questions about Rohwer? [To SM] Do you have other things about Rohwer you wanted to include?

SM: Let's see, Rohwer... let's see if I jotted down anything that we missed. [Looks at notes] I know that, I had classmates and friends from camp, like those from Fresno area, so when they had a Jerome reunion here in Fresno I was anxious to hook up with them, so I went to some of them to say hi, and I was surprised they didn't know who I was. And I realized that I wasn't a, I wasn't a troublemaker or anything where I would stand up and they would notice. I was just shy and quiet, so they didn't even notice me. But I knew who they were. Although one fellow called me out of the blue a few years later -- he had moved to Long Beach -- and he said, he said, "Sab, I remember you, and I want to apologize because at the reunion when you told us who you were I said I didn't know you. But," he said, "I never forget a face and I never forget a name, and this morning I was shaving and I said, 'Oh, I know who that guy was.'" So he called me long distance and he confessed. [Laughs] That was really interesting and funny.

KL: What are the Rohwer reunions like, the Fresno ones? Or maybe you've only been to that one?

SM: Well let's see, the Jerome reunion here in Fresno --

KL: Oh, I'm sorry, Jerome.

SM: Yeah, Jerome. Well, I was disappointed that my friends didn't remember me, but actually, I lived in the country and they were from different communities as well as the city, so I didn't expect them to know me too well 'cause I was in, I was, well, we were there three years. But it was, I don't remember too much about it other than people got a chance to see each other. That was nice.

KL: Just catch up.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.