Densho Digital Archive - Victor Ikeda Interview (denshovh-ivictor-01-0035)

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RP: Victor, you know, they were still building the camp when you guys got there, and there was quite a bit of, sort of, wood to scrounge. Many folks scrounged wood to build crude furniture for their barracks. Did you, did you do any of that?

VI: Not really. But my wife's family, somehow they got the furniture that was, some of that was stored in Seattle, over to Minidoka. I think, I don't know if you heard of Reverend Andrews, but he used to be the Baptist, Japanese Baptist minister. And he went with the relocation people, he and his family. And he had two daughters and a son, and the daughters were very close friends to a lot of Nisei girls that played basketball and all that. The whole family went to Minidoka, and he took trips back and forth from Twin Falls to Seattle and brought things back. That's an interesting story; and if you ever get a chance to talk to, like, Brooks Andrews, which is his son, he was probably more discriminated against than we were because all the sudden here came this "Jap lover." He rented a house, about a month or so they kicked him out. So he had a very hard time, he and his family, in Twin Falls. But I think he brought some furniture back for my wife's family, but basically you had to scrounge around to make your own furniture. As far as our room was concerned, I just remember the cots, the pot belly stove, and a desk that my dad had put together. Tom has some interesting interviews about these respectable people going and finding lumber to make different articles for the furniture, but as far as we were concerned, we didn't have that much made except the bare necessities.

RP: Early on, in the camp, there was really no sewage treatment plant in the --

VI: Right.

RP: -- facilities. And you shared a story about...

VI: Right. First time we went, since we were the earlier ones, that some of the sewage plants were working and the... so what they did was they built an outhouse, oversized outhouse, and we'd call it the ten-holer because there were five holes on one side and five on the other. So until they got the sewage and things working, we had to use that. So we'd eat breakfast, and all of a sudden we all trundled down there, and we'd sit. Of course, the smell wasn't the nicest thing, so somebody would always get the cigarette and says, "Let's pass the cigarettes and light the cigarettes so the smoke will kind of kill the smell." And that's where I learned how to smoke is that they'd pass the cigarettes, and, of course, I'd volunteer. Whether you inhaled or not it didn't matter, but you learned how to inhale. Then we'd always have some wiseacre that decides that he's through so he lights the toilet paper, and he throws it down there hoping that the toilet paper would catch on fire. Sometimes it did, but most the time it just kind of smoldered and sent the smoke up. [Laughs] But we remembered that until they got the sewage system fixed. And so by the time the rest of the people came, the sewage system was fixed so they didn't have to go through this ten-holer bit. In fact, some say that when they were in the assembly center when they were in the parking lot, that they had some outhouses because the sewage facilities wasn't adequate. But the ten-holer was a daily, daily trip that we all took down there and it became kind of a social joke, the whole bit, you know. [Laughs] Because you could imagine what kind of noises and things you hear when ten of us are sittin' there or four or five are sitting there. [Laughs]