Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Shig Kaseguma Interview
Narrator: Shig Kaseguma
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Date: November 6, 2007
Densho ID: denshovh-kshig-01-0013

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RP: And then you were shipped out to Minidoka.

SK: Minidoka, yeah. That was a experience by itself, anyway. But that was supposed to be a permanent place. But as soon as you got there and you see all the guards, and the guards are in position, it's all fenced in, barb wired. And you see the guards all posted around the place. You think, "This is it." "Do you mean we have to live here for the rest of our life?" You know, you get that kind of feeling. (...) Each barrack was about 20 by 120 feet. I don't know if you heard about this, someone already told you, but, and there were six families generally. And we had a big family, so we were at the very last, very last room. And there was eight of us in this one room, with a pot belly... and my dad was not very handy with his hands. A lot of people made furniture out of wood that was discarded when they built the place. So I, I kind of helped and made shelves and desks and stuff like that. But my dad didn't even know how to turn a screwdriver, I don't think at that time. He was spoiled rotten. [Laughs] But the experience was, during the winter it was cold, very cold. And summer was dusty. (...) It wasn't pleasant weather, except in the summer it was kind of nice. But winter was cold and muddy.

RP: Right, there were really some terrible drainage problems in the camp there. Water would just stand around and you'd have to slosh through it.

SK: Yeah, it was soft dirt. When they scrape anything, you got soft dirt, if you try to build something on it. But everyone made the best of it. Of course, when we first started, when we first got there, there was no toilets, no bathtubs, no showers. You had to wash up... and it was all, toilets, outdoor toilets anyway. I mean, there wasn't even toilet. But, little by little, they started making showers and doing a lot of other things as they went along. But somehow human being are very accommodating and they can feel that if you don't have it, you live without it kind of attitude. So everybody survived, I thought everybody wasn't unhappy with each other, as long as you had three meals going, I think. It's kind of like, it was like a fairy tale, I thought about it later. Like, it was almost like a fairy tale that you just survived, it was just a matter of survival. And it wasn't difficult to survive, but you survived.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.