Densho Digital Archive - Midori Suzuki - Sanzui A. Takaha Interview (denshovh-smidori

<Begin Segment 19>

MS: And Dad in the beginning, he was on some kind of a work crew. I know he was going out of camp, outside the camp, and again, he would bring back all those rocks to build the pond. So again, he built a great big pond in the front. And I don't know how he managed, but he brought those huge boulders back.

KL: How big were they?

MS: Big ones. They had to be awfully heavy. But he built a huge pond because we had the three units, and he built it, down the front of all three units, and it went underneath the stairwell to go on the other side of the small unit. And he got carps somewhere, I guess there was little irrigation ditches that had carps in it. And I guess he got to go fishing because he would bring, I think he had about three or four carps in there, great big things. They weren't very pretty, but we had fish in our fish pond. Then he'd find little sagebrush type things and he would plant those to make it look like a garden. It wasn't very pretty, but it was something.

KL: Did it have water in it? Did he build a pond?

MS: Yeah, he did.

KL: Was it concrete lined or was it dirt?

MS: No, no. It looked like clay.

TS: Yeah, probably.

MS: I don't know where he got that either, but he lined the whole thing with a, like a clay type material. So it was pretty innovative for him to find all that stuff to do.

KL: I got so excited when I read that last night, that he had a pond and a garden. Do you know if it's still visible at Topaz?

MS: It was the last time that we went there. We went to one of the reunions... the first time we went there, we couldn't really figure out the layout. The last time we went, it was for one of the reunions, and they had it kind of visibly marked so that you could figure out where it was. And we found the remains of the of the pond, the boulders that he had put up there.

KL: Did he line the edge of the pond with rocks, too?

MS: Yeah, well, that's what he kind of used with the big rocks. And then they were kind of placed so that they were attractive looking. So that was why we were able to find the pond.

KL: And you said part of it went kind of under the stairs? What was the shape of the pond?

MS: Well, it was just kind of a meandering thing.

KL: Yeah, I'll have to look and see if I can find pictures of it or anything. Did he make any carvings for that pond like at Tanforan?

MS: I don't remember. I think it was mostly just like a rock garden.

KL: I had a question actually, Sat, about working in the mess hall. Mess halls sometimes were pretty political places, they were gathering place sometimes, and like at Manzanar there was a worker's union of mess hall workers, because sugar --

ST: Oh, I wouldn't know about anything like that. [Laughs]

KL: You had no...

ST: Too busy.

KL: Did you hear of anything political about mess halls?

ST: No.

KL: No, it was just a place to eat?

MS: Well, it was. That's where they had all their meetings, though, after the questionnaire thing came out. That's when the draft became a reality. That's when our mother got very, very vocal.