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RP: What block did you live in, James?

JN: Well, we lived in Block 8, and before... and then we moved to Block 4. My father was a cook and he was, as I understand it, a well-respected cook. And Block 4 happened to be the professional peoples; that's where all the doctors lived. And when my mother came back -- I guess we lived in Block 8 for about, a little over a year -- he was able to go to work, so they wanted a chief cook at Block 4. So he took the job, and he became... so we moved the family over, they moved us over.

RP: So how many of there were you in Minidoka? It was your family...

JN: Just my father's children (...). And my older brother was in the military, he was, he was a linguist, he was able to speak Japanese, write Japanese. Not that that was why he was drafted.

RP: That was the brother that went back?

JN: That's right, my stepbrother.

RP: Kibei.

JN: Right. Well, you wouldn't call him a Kibei but... or maybe you will. Yeah, I think you would, yes. And my sister, she married rather than go to camp with the family on her own. She married her husband, she was seventeen, much to the despair of my mother and father, I might add. You know, she was a young kid yet.

RP: Where did she go?

JN: They went to an assembly center. They lived in a place called Des Moines, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. They did not go to Puyallup, they went to a place in California someplace, Palmdale... I can't remember the name.

RP: Pinedale.

JN: Pinedale. And somehow they came to Minidoka for not even a year when the war effort asked them to farm. But that's another great story. I was trying to relate that the other day to you, but yeah, so it was only my, me, my brother, younger brother, George, Mitsuko and Yaeko, my younger sisters, and my parents and myself. Six of us in Minidoka.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.