<Begin Segment 13>

RP: Talk about your first impressions of Manzanar, the first few days you were there. What struck you the most about the camp? If there's a certain sight, sound or smell that Manzanar evokes for you.

AF: The mountains. The snow and the mountains and fresh air. Of course, I was so young, eleven, twelve. You were so young, too.

NN: Well, I do have recollection, and I don't know why. The only image I have is at night, we were walking past the barracks, and I don't even know where we were going, whether we were headed home or going somewhere else, but you see the, because the barracks are made out of black tar, it's black. And so they had these windows, and there's the warm orange light piercing through, and there's a door slightly open, but I hear this child crying as if she's in pain. And that really didn't give me too much of a comforting feeling. But aside from that, I think the mountains were beautiful.

AF: Oh, yeah.

NN: I used to love to want to draw that.

AF: There's snow on the mountains. And the firebreaks.

NN: Oh my gosh, those dust storms were horrendous to our legs and to our faces. And remember the dust storms, when we're inside the cabin, you'd see this fine silt.

AF: Oh, you remember that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

NN: Windows, on the edges of the windows, coming through.

KT: It was no use sweeping. So my dad used to get a hose and just wash it, the floors.

RP: Many Nisei who were kids your age or even younger, they recall their experience as kind of an adventure of leaving Los Angeles and going somewhere mysterious.

AF: I guess it depends upon the age you are.

KT: I never looked at it as an adventure.

RP: How did you see it?

AF: She's older, so she, probably impacted you more.

KT: To me, maybe it's unfair to say this now, but then it was, it was exciting. 'Cause like I say, I've never seen so many Japanese, and people my age in one place. So it was something that, I could tell it was something that was going to open a new era for me.

RP: Because you were raised on a farm, kind of, bit of a sheltered life?

KT: Well, we were kind of raised in a sheltered life, I guess, but then, but for me to go to camp and see all these Japanese in one place, that, I'll never forget that feeling or that thought.

RP: And you resided in Block 14?

NN: Yes.

KT: 14-13-1.

RP: The whole time you were in camp?

NN: Yes, uh-huh. My father joined us later.

AF: Yeah, 'cause he was...

NN: In camp.

RP: Where did he, where was he sent after Tujunga? Did he to go Santa Fe, or...

AF: No, he didn't go there.

KT: New Mexico, wasn't it New Mexico?

NN: Well, he never talked about his experiences there. And I remember my dad having this dark black hair. I mean, very beautiful. But when he came and joined us in camp, he had lost all his hair, and I think it's come kind of major stress that caused that.

AF: Oh, that's right, that's right.

NN: So it took a while for it to ever grow back in.

RP: How long was he gone, roughly?

KT: I can't recall.

RP: A year?

NN: Probably about a year and a half maybe, you think?

KT: Gee, I don't know.

NN: I don't know for sure.

RP: Did you, did you write him periodically, or did he write you?

AF: No, because he's not the type to communicate too much, and we didn't know Japanese, and that's all he spoke. He was mainly Japanese spoken...

RP: So he's out there somewhere and you don't know what's going on.

NN: Mother didn't know either, so it was very...

RP: That's traumatic.

AF: And she didn't drive, so that was another thing. And I remember we had to get one of our neighbor's sons to visit him one time.

KT: Oh, that was before we left for camp.

AF: Uh-huh, before we left for camp, yeah. I remember, 'cause my mother didn't drive at all. The one experience she had, she had an accident, remember, going down the hill? And that was the end of her driving.

NN: My father delivered the gardenias to the various florists, and this was in the Hollywood Hills area. And evidently, the brakes didn't hold. And so she was in the car while he was making the delivery, and evidently the car rolled down and crashed into something. Fortunately, it wasn't that severe of an injury.

AF: No, it was not.

NN: But it was traumatic. [Laughs]

AF: That was the end of her driving lessons.

NN: Oh, she was having driving lessons then?

AF: She was going to or something.

NN: Oh, really? That I didn't know.

AF: Yeah, but she never got too far. She got the neighbor's sons to help her, thank goodness.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.