Densho Digital Archive - Shig Kaseguma Interview (denshovh-kshig-01-0015)

<Begin Segment 15>

KP: So your first experience with the Californians was after the questionnaire, when the people from Tule Lake came to Minidoka? Was that... where was this?

SK: Yeah, some came from there, but not too many. Because a lot of them wanted to get out of there, because it was getting pretty... rabble-rousers were really getting onto people that signed "yes."

KP: And that was your first experience with the Californians?

SK: Yeah, that's when I first learned that there was a difficulty with it. Because we don't correspond with them. But when they start coming in, we realize that something was going on. These people were being harmed, I guess.

RP: Right, and they had to make room for all the quote "disloyals" coming in from other camps. So they started sending out all the "loyal" Tuleans out... and you guys got, I think, 2,000.

SK: Yeah, that was really a problem.

RP: In talking about groups and different perspectives and things, Minidoka actually had three different groups. You had a group of Japanese Americans from Seattle, Washington, and you had a rural Japanese population, then you had folks from Portland.

SK: Portland, right.

RP: Yeah. Can you discuss a little bit about the interchanges between those groups? Did they all kinda stay amongst themselves?

SK: Yeah, in the beginning, see, Block 5 was on the one tail end of it. It was kind of like there was a school in the middle. And then the others kept up to 36, I think, Block 36. The Portland group went up to the other end. And we were on the, the Northwest people were generally on the lower side. We got along pretty good as far as that goes, because (...) before the war, we used to play basketball against the Portland people. They would come to Seattle, and Seattle people would go there. And the girls knew the men, you know how the girls are. That's, my wife was born in Portland. And she would tell me all this about what happened, when the kids came over there. Which kids were real cute and all that stuff, you know. But we got along real well. In fact, the whole camp, there wasn't a section where there was one against the other.

RP: Like there was in Manzanar and Tule Lake.

SK: Yeah, not like some of the camps that were all divided and you couldn't dare walk into that side or this side, you know. But I think our camp was one of the more peaceful places to live.