<Begin Segment 6>

KL: So what grade were you in when you were sent out of Watts, when you came to Manzanar? Were you a junior?

MW: I think I was... I thought I was in the, because I graduated, supposed to have been winter of '43. I think that was our winter because I'm a December birthday.

KL: And you attended school in Manzanar for a semester?

MW: Yes, for a very short time, though, just a semester or so. Because I had all of these girls and I used to tell my mother, "Mother, be thankful if I'm right in half of the class." I said, "Boy, these girls are really smart. That's going to bring the average up a lot." So I said, "If I'm in the middle half," I said, "Mother, be happy." I used to tell her that, you know.

KL: Where were you? Where did you fall?

MW: I was in the middle. (...) And like Toy and my girlfriend that's passed on now, Ruth, well, she's married, Kikawa, her maiden name was Saito, and they were very, very smart girls.

KL: Did you meet them in Manzanar?

MW: No. Ruth, I knew her from before the war, and Toy I met in camp, she was in my camp. She was very active, so she would gather the people around, and girls, and we had a club called Mademoiselle, and that's when, it hasn't been too long ago now. But what they used to do was Toy's sister-in-law in Venice, she would have all of these girls that were in the club of Mademoiselle, get together. What we'd do is take whatever kind of food we like (...). Everybody will bring food, and I wish I could... oh, I wish I had that. I don't know where I put it. They had a cake that they put on something like, "Be thankful we survived," or whatever it was. And I thought that was so neat, but she had it every year at her house. But one by one, as we got older, somebody got sick, somebody passed on, you know, and so we had to just cut it off.

KL: You said it before we turned on the tape, but what is Toy's last name?

MW: Oh, Toy is Sato, S-A-T-O. And Ruth's maiden name... no, that's her maiden name. Sato is her married name. Her maiden name was Ioki, I-O-K-I.

KL: Oh. Is she related to Sus?

MW: Yeah, that's his sister. Sus is... is Sus active?

KL: I've seen him at the reunions.

MW: Oh, really? That's his sister. Not the oldest, but...

KL: And they're from West L.A.?

MW: Yeah. (...) That's the sister-in-law, that's where we used to meet.

KL: So tell me about studying. You said you arrived at Manzanar, and then there were a couple months where you studied on your own with your books from your old school.

MW: Well, yeah, we had to wait until the books came, and I wasn't sure whether they were going to send them to the school. So we wrote back to the David Starr Jordan High School in Watts, (...) and they did send us book, and we did send it back. We got credit for sports through the activities that we played there. And so that's how we did that. And then there was always, you get that many people in the camp, there's always someone who's a sewing teacher, whatever, teacher, there's different things, just like there'd be nurses and doctors, the same thing, and seamstress and things like that. And so that's how we had gotten credit for that type of thing, because you got to have credit for, I think, back then was, you had to play sports or some kind of activity, outside activity.

KL: Once school started in an organized way, how was it compared to Watts? How was it different? You said the students academically were tough.

MW: Oh, they were high.

KL: How were the teachers?

MW: Oh, the teachers were nice. They were very nice, and they seemed like they were quite understanding. We never talked about anything to do with race or anything, that was never discussed because everybody knew where they were. They knew what was... no, they knew what was happening to them, we didn't know about other camps, because you never got news of it. We did when my sister-in-law's cousin came and he was in the service and he's got this uniform on, and I'm thinking, holy cow, he's got a uniform on. But he wanted to see where she was staying and I guess he got the pass from the main office because they have to go through there before they can come and visit. So it was an interesting thing. You know, when you're raised (...) and you don't have any kind of discrimination, you never had it. So you don't know anything about it, you really don't understand it. But most of the people, the young people that I met there, they were not thinking deeply about discrimination or things of that sort.

We never talked about the war, we never talked about... and my brother couldn't, they didn't take him in the service because he had to be the head of the family for us. So I know that's the reason why they didn't take him. But, well, like my husband was the same age as I am, so he went. They draft you anyway back then when you were eighteen, they just draft you. And so he never got to see any action even if he was in Italy because they put him through one of those paratrooper school, and I said, "Where were they going to drop you? You look just like the enemy." I said. "Where were you going to be dropped, why would they want to put you..." He says, "I don't know." So he got delayed going to Italy. Now, he was with the 442, he was in that group, but he went to Italy late, and so he didn't get to see any action of any sort.

KL: Who is your husband?

MW: George Wada. He lived in Huntington Beach. Because my maiden name was Mikami.

KL: I see. Was he in Manzanar also, George.

MW: No. And his father took them out from, they were at Rohwer, (...) and went to Colorado with all the boys and farmed over there.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.