<Begin Segment 14>

KP: Can I ask a question here? What's the most memorable person you ran into? Who stands out in your mind as the most memorable person that you ran into in the Catalina camp?

SY: Well, there was a man... what the hell. I'm gonna have to think about this because I can't bring back the name. My goodness.

RP: What was... why does he stick out in your mind, Sus?

SY: When we were... when we first went down there in the back of the truck, at least from the, from the courthouse, we were in shackles. We were in shackles, I mean, shackles. We had, we had handcuffs and then chain and we had a metal ball. Could you believe? We had a metal ball, I don't know how many pounds. Maybe 20 pounds. You couldn't even drag that thing if you wanted to. And that was our means of, of surviving from Denver to Tucson, okay. And also after going into Tucson from, from that, from that depot in Tucson, the train depot, we were also not... we were shackled in the back of the truck up to the mountain, 4,000 feet, where the complex was. And after that they took it off. But that, during that time, it was somewhere close to maybe two o'clock in the morning and there's one guy shaking us awake. And then he had been there maybe about two years before ever somebody else ever coming in there. And we were the Japanese group and he was a Japanese person. And this man was so educated. Not only that educated, but he had, he had a clear mind as to what was happening outside and everything. So it was quite amazing. Yeah. I gotta bring back his name. I can't remember his name. That's one of the memorable things. And he was a, he was a big gambler. I mean, if not $100,000, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. And after we come back, and every year we'd have these reunions and he says, "Sus, let's go up to..." He'd call everybody and, "Let's go up to Reno and have a good time." And we'd stay up there over the weekend and the establishment over there would give us housing for two nights, all the meals for two days, were free. And he... it was because of him that we were able to do that. And something like somewhere around thirty-five people. That's a lot of money, really. Yeah.

RP: So you, you guys had these reunions of folks that... at the Catalina camp?

SY: Right, right.

RP: How many times did you guys meet?

SY: Pardon?

RP: How many times would you, did you meet?

SY: We were averaging somewhere close to maybe... sometimes every year. Sometimes every other year. Depending on the, the work schedule. Or some people can't come, well, we'll not do it this year, we'll do it next year.

RP: Uh-huh. Would some of these Hopis or the Navajo chief...

SY: No, no, never.

RP: These were just other conscientious objectors, other Japanese Americans? Uh-huh. Wow. So, you leave the Catalina camp and where do you go next? Do you... you haven't seen your mother in nine months or actually longer than that...

SY: Quite a while.

RP: Right.

SY: I would say because of the fact that I was in county jail for six months and I was in Tucson for nine months...

RP: Year and a half.

SY: So, that's what? Fifteen months. So maybe about a year and a half or so I didn't see my mom. And the three, the three person that was, had the, they call it short timer, the one that had the least amount of time, they were able to get into camp. And, but then the county, the administration found out that we were back and they, they told 'em, "Hey, you can't come here. We can't allow you to stay here." So they chased them out. However, Joe, my good friend, they couldn't find him. They were sitting... he was staying at his sister's place, not his mother's place. So next day when he was walkin' around camp, the security says, "We can't allow you here so we're gonna have to take you out of here." He says, "I walked in here and I'm gonna walk out." The security chief, his name was Tomlinson, yeah, he followed him out of camp. Yeah. Shortly thereafter, not maybe a month later, we arrived in that area. Mr. Taguma, my brother Min, and myself, there was three of us, and Kazuo Kunitake, but then Kazu, he was, his reaction was too slow. You know, he could think a whole lot, but physically he, his reaction was slow so we couldn't take him into camp. Because if you're too slow, you can't, you can't make it to the next brush, see. So we walked from, we hiked from Granada to the back of the camp. I don't know, what, is that about 4 miles, three or four miles? And we, we knew that they, there was the area where the wire was loose because of the fact that it was, there was a gully underneath it and they had filled that gully but the wire was loose. So we'd sneak into camp that way. For about almost two weeks, every night.

RP: Every night.

SY: Two weeks.

RP: Uh-huh.

SY: Then one night, the final night, we're sitting there attending a movie because 9E was a movie place. And I was across the street, 10E. So a friend of mine, he was a security, but he told me, he says, "You 'd better run, you'd better get out of here. They're looking for you." The three of us, we ran. Have you ever run in darkness as hard as you could run? And you could hear 'em back there running at you. We made it out of there. I don't know what they would have done if they... as an example, that we were in illegal entry. I don't know what they could have done to us. So, right after, Mr. Matsunaga, who was the farmer that we were helping out during the daytime, knew that we were short of money so he gave us enough money to reach Denver and he gave us, I don't know, each, I don't know how many dollars at that time.

RP: Really.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.