<Begin Segment 20>

KL: Yeah. Well, so, okay, here's two questions real quick and then I'll give you the other big ones. One is, did your dad ever write graffiti up there, do you know?

KN: No. But there were three or four bachelors living in the end unit of our barrack. They were Kibei-Niseis, Kibei-Niseis were Niseis who went back to Japan, they went to school, they came back, so they're basically all pro-Japan. Ben Suyenobu, Frank Ego, I forgot the other two guys' names. They were young men probably in their twenties. Well, they got hired -- this is the story I heard. They got hired to go fix the leaks on the roofs of the detachment attached to the military, attached to Manzanar. So they started painting this red stuff, and the story goes, and I think it's true, is that they made it bigger and bigger, and they all ended up with a Hinomaru. And they decided, well, let's fix it up and they made it into the gunki, which is the rising sun, which is the military flag. Apparently that day or the next day -- nobody knew it was up there because it's a roof -- the West Coast commander of the army came by, and he wouldn't land the plane because he thought the Japanese took over the detachment. They had a big hearing about how it happened. And of course, one of the guys that later on worked with my dad, said, "Wow, we were in a spot, and we did it. We did it as a prank, and we're sorry about it, but stuff happens. Oh, we're making this and it's sort of not symmetrical, so we tried to mound it up and it got bigger and bigger." And how did this thing happen, and said, "Well, not quite sure, but there was some paint running around, so we had to make it all the way down, so we started putting these lines." [Laughs] of course, that was all a lie. I think they went in the clink for a few days for that, you know, detachment, right? They got punished for it. Then that was a prank they did, I know. The other thing they did was I had, I have a sword, if I could find it maybe. They made me a Japanese samurai sword, they're very artistic guys. They took a bed, I think, somehow they found a stainless steel piece, that was more, steel, and they cut it. And they also got a fence post, one of the fence posts that they traded out, and they made a sword handle out of it. You could tell there's nail holes in the sheath, because that's the only one they could get. They can't get a complete piece of wood with no nails in it. So they did a nice job, I had a sword, Japanese sword with a wooden sheath that had, it was a fence post of Manzanar they made during the war. So these guys were pretty artistic people. So those were a couple of humorous stories I could tell you.

KL: Yeah. Did those guys to go to Tule Lake, do you remember?

KN: No, somehow they avoided it. They were there 'til the end. And with Ben Suyenobu and Frank Ego, the family maintained ties with them because Ben Suyenobu went on to become a ceramist, a gifted ceramist, who made a, like Marie Antoinette, those kind of, that wore these dresses, all in ceramics. Beautiful ceramics.

KL: So another question I had, and you reminded me of it when you said your dad's labels in Japanese may have been his way of protesting...

KN: Yeah, well, just surmising.

KL: Did you ever hear him or any other of the guayule people in particular talk about their feelings about being incarcerated?

KN: No, he never spoke about it. I'm sure he had feelings about it. Even my son surmised that... I told him about it, he went and took pictures of it, went to Manzanar. Did you know the Manzanar Committee didn't know that reservoir existed for a long time? You know how I found out? I told my son about it, he went and saw it. Then he went to one of the Manzanar... what do they call those things, remembrance things, and he told them there's a reservoir there. They said, "Really?" And he showed them where it was. But he went and took pictures of it, and he confronted my dad, because grandfathers are sweeter to the grandson, right? And he said, "Gee, Jiichan," he says, "you must have been awful PO'd about this." He goes, "Yeah, sometimes time helps it," he says. He didn't deny it. He would have never told me. So my son said, "Yeah, I showed Grandpa."

KL: Did your grandparents ever, in later years, talk about their feelings about Manzanar?

KN: Who, me?

KL: Your grandparents.

KN: My grandparents?

KL: Yeah.

KN: My grandmother died in 1951, okay, the other two went to Japan in 1945. And the only one left here was my grandfather, he never talked about it. He never even talked about Santa Fe or Missoula. Except for that one funny incident, they thought they could, they got an eel.

KL: The salamander or whatever it was?

KN: Yeah, it was a salamander, it has legs on it, he said. Oh, god, he says, panic broke out in the mess hall. They're ready to eat this thing, ahh, it's got legs on it.

KL: The poor thing was probably long gone.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.