<Begin Segment 18>

RP: Well, what brought you to, to Denver this week, Sus?

SY: Oh, at that time?

RP: No, to this conference this week.

SY: Oh, my... I have a nephew in L.A. I go visit quite often. And we had a Shigin conference about a month and a half ago in L.A. And whenever I go to L.A. I go to Malibu and I stay at his place. It's quite a distance between L.A. proper and Malibu but then I didn't mind that. I wanted to get to know him better and his wife is really a personable person. And he says... after I got back one night he says, "You're going to Amache reunion." I says, "What?" "You're going to Amache reunion," that's what he says. "My wife has made all the arrangements. All you have to do is take the plane." So here I am. Yeah.

RP: And while you were here you got to see one of your old buddies yesterday.

SY: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

RP: That's Eddie Nakagawa?

SY: Yeah.

RP: Uh-huh. And you grew up with him in Cortez?

SY: Yeah, well, he grew up right next door to me, right across the street. But Eddie is about... I think he was born in 1920. So he is now about eighty-nine years old. But he was away from school a lot but I knew his brother, Jack, real well. We used to fight. Oh, we used to fight. Oh my goodness. Gee whiz. The kind... well, he was a brat too, see. [Laughs]

RP: If you're a brat, you're a brat. [Laughs]

SY: He'd get up on the tank house -- there was a tank house beside the road -- he'd get up on that thing and he'd throw rocks at us, you know. Yeah. And he's quite accurate, too. [Laughs]

RP: [Laughs] So how did you fix him?

SY: Yeah, yeah. Can't remember the retaliation we used to do, but yeah.

RP: What did you... oh, you can't remember what you did?

SY: No. No. You can fight but, you know, you forget those things. Yeah.

RP: Yeah. Uh-huh. One other thing, while you were in Amache you took up judo, wasn't it? That was the first time in your life that you...

SY: Right. You know when we were young, we used to do kendo. And I remember being cold, dressed up four o'clock in the morning and you go practice kendo.

RP: Where did you do that? At the Japanese...

SY: At the Japanese school. And also we used to go to Livingston. And boy, those boards were cold. Barefoot on that cold floor, wow.

RP: Oh, barefoot.

SY: I'll never forget that.

RP: Were these indoor or outdoor kendo...

SY: Well it's indoor. Yeah, yeah.

RP: Okay. But traditionally you, you don't wear footwear.

SY: No. Bare feet.

RP: Right. Now did you have the whole setup? The mask and all the --

SY: Right, yeah.

RP: -- armor and...

SY: Armor, the, the...

RP: Breastplate.

SY: Breast armor, the head armor, the two what you call, those gloves and everything. Oh, you hurt. Oh you hurt. No matter how much pad you got, it hurt. I tell you, bango, you hurt. You know these bamboo... it's all put together with a broken shaved bamboo, but they hurt. I mean, they hurt. Yeah. Especially when you get hit right here [points to temples]. There's nerves over here that really... yeah. No matter what kind of padding you've got.

RP: You still get it. So I can see why you wanted to give up kendo for judo.

SY: [Laughs] Well, see, there was no other sport that I could participate because kendo was a Japanese sport. Well, naturally judo is, too, but when we, when we left for Amache, when we left for the camp, we buried all our things.

RP: Right, I meant to ask you about that.

SY: We destroyed all that.

RP: Yeah, a lot of families did.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.