Densho Digital Archive - George Izumi Interview (denshovh-igeorge-01-0007)

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JA: Now, you were older than that, you were out of school. What did you do at Manzanar? Did you find work there?

GI: Oh yes, there was always, there was all kinds of work, but they're only getting paid $16 a month for just... I remember the first job I had was I was working in the... the first job was to clean up the, clean up that old highway that goes through Manzanar. Clean up all the sagebrush and all the brush that grew up along the highway. We, we did, we did all that. And I worked on a construction crew there, working, since I had a little experience in woodwork, I was working with, with a construction crew building steps for the barracks.

And I want to tell another story about one fellow by the name of Joe, Joe Kurihara. You probably know that name. I wrote to him, and he was very, very bitter about the whole evacuation, and he used to cuss the, cuss the government out just about every day I worked with him. And this I don't blame him for one thing. He was a World War I veteran, so I can't blame him. But then, you know, still, if you're, play a, put in a camp like Manzanar you have to make the most of it, do what you can. And do what you can to prove to the American people that you're just as good as they are, and that's what I did anyway. And I couldn't tell that to everybody because too many people, too many liberal-minded people in that camp, as it is even today.

JA: Did a lot of people, however, share your attitude?

GI: Well, no, we didn't share the attitude. We just took it for granted. [Laughs]

JA: What other kinds of jobs did you have?

GI: Well, I worked in a mess hall when I... because every harvest season that was in the wintertime, we were asked if we would like to work out in the beet field up in Montana or Idaho or bits of Oregon. And so I went, I went to work, and, in the beet field in Montana, and that was quite an experience. Because when we went to Montana, the people there thought they were going to see a bunch of Japanese getting off the train with horned-rim glasses and with radios, you know, and all this-and-that, that's all propaganda. And once we got there, they were surprised that we can speak better English than they can, which we did, because we were all educated in the United States, and besides, we were not in the deep country like Montana, we were 60 miles from Canada. They were really surprised that we can speak better English than they can.

JA: So how long were you away from camp at the beet fields?

GI: Oh, until the harvest season was over, that was about end of October, and we were back again. Then we were getting ready to go again in the springtime to go back to Idaho to thin beets and then odd jobs, pitch hay.

JA: What was the... before you got to be in the mess hall, what was the quality of the food? I know it got pretty good after you got there.

GI: No, no, I, I wasn't the cook. [Laughs]

JA: Oh, okay. What kind of food did they serve?

GI: Oh, the food was regular... well, I would call it regular slop, but it was, you know, we didn't, we, here again we were free to roam, so we found out that, which mess hall had the best food. You know, some mess halls had some professional cooks and bakers, so we found out, find that out, and 22 I think had the, had a professional baker there and so we knew that they had the best desserts, so we used to go over there. But I, when I worked at the mess hall in Block 16, I was, I was asked to go in early in the morning to start up the oil stoves, to get the stove ready for the cooks before they came in. And in other words, just heated up so they'll be ready to cook when they got in. That's when I found out that, you know, that people used to complain that, "How come our block is, doesn't have its quota of sugar, or yeast?" You know, yeast-made product. And I found out they were using that to make so-called Japanese shochu, you know, out of dried -- they would get whatever dried fruit that they could get a hold of, especially raisins and prunes, and they would make that out of that. I found that out. But there was not much you could do about that because they, they did what they wanted to do and they got away with it.