<Begin Segment 5>

LP: So going back to Florin, so we talked a little bit about the setup of the church, but the physical transportation part of it going to Florin, the truck was packed, was there anything that you can recall being really hard to leave behind where you all were living besides the equipment that your dad had, anything for you? No pets, no anything like that.

RM: No, we didn't have any pets, so like I say, our parents were moving, so I just said, "Okay, we're going," so that's why I went. I didn't question anything.

LP: And then were there any impressions that you had of Florin in particular? You said that the demographics at your school changed pretty significantly and all that.

RM: Yeah, see, you have to understand, I was a very, very naive kid. I just... even now, I accept things as they are. So when I went there, that's what it was, so I just accepted that. I never thought about being different. I only think about things being different when I got older in life. I never really thought about being different.

LP: So at what point did you leave Florin to then go to Heart Mountain?

RM: Okay, for Florin, when they... I can't remember what month we went to camp. See, Florin was a town with probably ninety percent Japanese Americans, with Japanese and Japanese Americans. And what they did was, there was a railroad track right in the middle. One side went to one camp, another side went to another camp. Because I understand the government did not want the whole town to go to the same camp because after I learned that, after I came here, you have a big group like that go to one camp, the government thought they might start problems, so they split 'em. So we went to one camp and people from the other side of the railroad went to another camp. So that's where we ended up in what they called assembly center, what they called Marysville. From Marysville we went to Tule Lake. And from Tule Lake, after the "loyalty questionnaire," we moved Jerome, Arkansas. Jerome was the last camp open, first camp closed. And after I volunteered, I learned that Jerome became a German prison camp. And then after Jerome we went to Heart Mountain. So I spent a year in each camp.

LP: So then it would be Florin to Marysville to Tule Lake, am I understanding that correctly? It was Florin to Marysville to Tule Lake?

RM: Yes.

LP: What was that progression like? What do you remember about going from those places to Tule Lake?

RM: I just remember my younger sister then was about maybe less than a year old, so I remember my mother having to carry her, and all you could take is what you could carry. So my mother had my sister in her, and so I carried whatever I could carry. That's all you could take, so I remember that's all we did. And I remember the armed guards and being on a train, and that's all I remember about there and arriving in Marysville. And in Marysville it was next to a swamp. Two things I remember is mosquitoes and ice cream. Mosquitoes, so a lot of mosquitoes, so what they did was they put netting over the bed, but they didn't help because you know why? The flooring, the wooden floor, it was that far apart, so mosquitoes would come underneath that, so you had to put netting on the floor to keep the mosquitoes out. And then ice cream, wherever ice cream is, I used to run around with my cousin, who was about four years older than I was. Him and his buddies, they went around and got... see, to go to eat, you had to have mess hall passes. So I don't know how they got 'em, they got all these passes from all these different mess halls, and any time we had ice cream, we had about four or five different passes, so we'd run around to all the different mess halls to get ice cream. [Laughs] That's the only thing I remember. Other than that, I don't remember anything about Marysville, because there was really nothing to do. No school.

LP: On the train, a person I interviewed yesterday, he remembered asking to look out the window and being told no. Do you remember...

RM: I remember that, yeah. Bench seat, didn't look out the window. I remember that sometimes when you're out the country, you could put the shades up, but as soon as you get to a town, an armed guard would come by and they'd pull the shades down. They wouldn't let you peek out.

LP: Was there... I'm trying to think, from the perspective of the kids, seeing an armed guard, was that really intimidating to you as a kid, or did you feel any emotion, like what was that like to be interacting with the army?

RM: As a kid I never thought about that. The reason is [coughs] -- excuse me -- because I had seen soldiers before. Where we were living, in Lakewood, farming, where we lived, my first three years I went to a two-room schoolhouse, we used only one room. But for walking to school, across our farm was Douglas Airplane. So walking to school, there was an anti-aircraft gun on the road, and there were always soldiers there. So I used to see them all the time, so I was used to seeing soldiers. So I guess it was when I saw them, and that was when I was in the second and third grade. So I guess when I saw the soldiers on the train, I never thought about anything about that, because I had seen it before. It was not something new to me.

LP: So at Marysville, besides the mosquitoes, what was the housing like?

RM: Barracks. Like I said, they had cracks on the floor, wide and all that, and it was poorly built, that's all I remember.

LP: In your mind, did they seem just the same as the ones in the other camps, it was just typical construction?

RM: Yeah, yeah. The ones I remember most is the Tule Lake ones, were just terrible.

LP: So going from Marysville to Tule Lake, what was that, were you brought over by train?

RM: By train.

LP: And what are your memories about being told, "We're going to Tule Lake now," and that progression?

RM: See, I don't really remember the train ride from Marysville to Tule Lake. Maybe because it wasn't that far, comparatively. Going from Tule Lake to Jerome was far, but Marysville was... Tule Lake was in California so I really don't remember too much about that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.