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-01-0017

<Begin Segment 17>

RP: Well, let's talk about the real nitty-gritty, like drinking, smoking.

SK: The what?

RP: Drinking, smoking, and dating.

SK: Oh, oh, yeah. Well, of course, I started smoking when I went to camp. I went to Camp Harmony. I mean, somebody had cigarettes. I don't know where they got the money for 'em. But then, drinking, of course, I was by age, was of age anyway. But when I went to Minidoka, there was nothing else to do. But somebody would go into town and bring in a bottle of cheap wine, 4 Roses and all that stuff, stuff that you can't even buy anymore. And we would drink a little bit. And people like Victor, they would want some drink. And we said, "No, you're too young. You're not twenty-one yet." And so, but it wasn't, a lot of the first-generation people, they made their own, out of rice.

RP: Sake?

SK: Sake.

RP: Shochu?

SK: They drank that. I knew they drank that. The way they acted after they cooked. [Laughs] And during the nights, there's nothing else for them to do, I guess. But we didn't drink that much, cause we couldn't afford it. It was a rare thing that somebody went into town and got it, the little amount we had.

RP: Now you were part of a very tightly knit group of guys.

SK: Yeah. There was a lot of those.

RP: Yeah?

SK: Yeah.

RP: And your group was called the OTs?

SK: Yeah.

RP: Uh-huh. And how did you guys get your nickname?

SK: There was about twenty of us, I think. I don't know if there was twenty, fifteen or so.

RP: Did you know each other before camp?

SK: Not all of 'em. But some kind of drifted in, because of the proximity of each others' homes, I mean, and if you didn't belong to somebody, what were you going to do all day long? Either we played baseball together, or went ice skating together, it was kind of fun. And you play cards. And nobody had money, but we played Japanese hana, a card game. And we tried to invent games to play with. And when we got a bottle of whiskey or something, boy, everybody was, "What the hell is that?" [Laughs] Young kids anyway. But they all wanted to try it. They all got sick.

RP: So most of you were about the same age, or other than Victor?

SK: Yeah, no, his group there was about five, that had to go to school. We'd chase them out to school every morning. A lot of them didn't go. We told them to get the hell outta there, but other than that, we were, I think there was a need for being comrades. Because otherwise, you're ostracized and where can you go? You didn't want to go to the next block, because you didn't even know anybody there. So it was kind of a nice feeling that you belong to somebody. And the parents, I don't know if the parents appreciated that. Because they would eat in Block 5, my father's... like Junks, or Victor would come over and they would eat. 'Cause there wasn't the stigma that you can't eat, you have to eat with your family. So the family life became sort of --

RP: Fractured?

SK: -- fractured. Very much so. 'Cause you didn't sit as a family to eat, you ate with your friends. Even the girls did the same thing. And I think that was one of the biggest thing that my mother complained about. She said, " Gee, there's no family life." And she (knew) a lot of families, the parents didn't have control of their kids anymore. They were more faithful to their friends than they were to their parents. And I think that did fracture the family, this kind of thing.

[Interruption]

RP: So with the kind of break-up of the traditional family ties, there was a need to bond together with other groups like you guys.

SK: You need someone to bond, not to love so much, but just to bond, to have a feeling of family, I think. Because the whole family was (...) sort of fractured anyway. It's too bad it happened that way. 'Cause the youngest brother of mine, there's thirteen years difference between myself and him. And my younger sisters, I never knew the family, because when I came back from the army, then I went to school back in Seattle, came back to University of Washington. Consequently, all the growing up age, I never knew them until they grew up. And it was kind of a shame that we lost all that. But we kept in touch, which was great. And my youngest brother lives in upper New York and I live in Seattle (...) and my sisters all live in Chicago.

RP: Right in the middle.

SK: They're right in the middle.

RP: You'll have to meet in Chicago.

SK: But now we're closer than ever.

RP: Even though you're so distant geographically, it's sort of ironic. You know, Victor was telling me, actually, it was Tom. His son was telling me that this group kind of experienced sort of a schism in camp when the "loyalty questionnaire" came out. He said that seven guys were "no-nos" and seven guys were "yes-yes."

SK: I didn't know the exact count, because I left right after that. But there was a couple of 'em I know, that I knew real well who they were. But the other, I don't know how they signed. But the one, my brother-in-law, my sister married him in Chicago. The one that's right in the middle. And he was a "no-no." And there was the one, two, yeah, then there was three of them.

RP: In your group?

SK: In our group. But their parents were very strict. They're very strict parents. And I think they just follow what the father and mother said. They didn't give 'em a chance, I don't think.

RP: Like your parents did? Said you know, you're old enough, you decide.

SK: More democratic, you might say. How would you like to be treated? How would you want to be signing? (...) I felt sorry for some of them because that's the way they got pushed. But they justified it afterwards that that's the way they felt. But I think since they followed the parents' idea more, but I would never say that to anybody, I would never in the world. So, but they survived, although they had that stigma against them from the returning veterans. They really took a bashing when they came back.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.