<Begin Segment 6>

JA: What do you remember first seeing when you arrived at Manzanar?

GI: What a dusty place it was. [Laughs] And the wind would blow in, I can see the old -- the dust come out through the floorboard and through the walls, you know. Well, until we got around to fixing all the holes and taking care of the apartment, and I can't remember too much about that.

JA: How did you fix the holes?

GI: Oh, I don't know, we just patched it up. And we were, we were given so much, I forgot whether it was nails or what, and we had to go find whatever wood that we can or whatever we needed to patch up the holes in the barracks. I don't remember too much about that.

JA: Tell me about the living quarters.

GI: Well, it was just small... that's a big question because, you know, I'm trying to figure it out myself in my own mind: how did all the brothers and my mother and father live in that one room? [Laughs] Yeah, that's, that's a... I can't figure that out, but we did. We all slept in one room and we had one, we had one stove, and I know, Alisa asked me, "Where was that stove situated in the barracks?" and I couldn't tell her. So I called up my brother, younger brother, and I asked him. I says, "Do you remember where that stove was in our room?" He said, "No, I can't even remember that." So, you know, it's pretty hard to try to remember everything that transpired in camp.

JA: So how many of you were there in that space?

GI: There were six of us in there, six or seven in one room.

JA: And you slept there and lived there.

GI: Oh yeah, we slept there, and then, then we... and the latrine was wide open, the showers were wide open. But, you know, I can't remember too much how -- I must have taken a shower every day but I don't remember all the little incidents like that.

JA: Did you share beds or did everyone have a separate bed?

GI: No, everybody had a, one cot. Like the army cots, you know.

JA: It must have been a pretty crowded space.

GI: It was. We made the most of it. And I don't know, every, so did everybody else. We made Manzanar what, what it turned out to be, a very livable camp.

JA: What were some of the things you did to make it livable?

GI: Well, well, we didn't have too much to worry about because we were given three, three meals a day and we were given some clothing, and the only thing was that, well, we could do what we want in camp, so we had our free hand. And, I'd like to straighten this out: one thing about Manzanar, you know, they say, "Well, it was like a prison camp." I say it was not a prison camp. We were allowed to go -- if we had a place to go out of California we were, we were free to go if we had a place to go, but they wouldn't release anybody unless they had a definite place to go in, in the United States. So you can't say, you know, we were kept there. But it was -- I'll emphasize again -- it was, it was a safe place. In fact, I talked to one of the fellows there that was interviewed in Manzanar. He says, "Well, heck, I was really glad to be in Manzanar because I didn't have to worry about any more people, any more people calling me 'Japs' and calling me dirty names and whatever." So, you know, that, that's part of history.

JA: And the soldiers didn't talk to you like that either?

GI: No. You had to remember one thing about the soldiers, the GIs, they were all eighteen-, nineteen-year-old kids, so what do you expect from an eighteen, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old kid? So you gotta picture yourself in that same situation. They were only, they were only told what they were supposed to do, and they did what they were told.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.