Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Taeko Joanne Iritani Interview
Narrator: Taeko Joanne Iritani
Interviewer: Kirk Peterson
Location: Sacramento, California
Date: October 17, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-itaeko-01-0008

<Begin Segment 8>

KP: So when did you arrive at Poston? Was it nighttime, daytime?

TI: Well, we arrived that day in Parker, Arizona, there's a Parker Dam on the Colorado River. And the name of Poston is actually the Colorado River relocation center. And we took an army truck, I'm sure it was, from Parker to Poston and saw all those barracks all lined up. Black tarpaper barracks one after another.

KP: What time of day was it, do you remember?

TI: It was daytime. And it was very dusty. Of course, every camp was dusty because they had to scrape that soil in order to make everything, put the new barracks on. So it was very, very dusty. And we were dropped off at a place where we had to register, we were each wearing our tags. I think my family number was 31331, something like that. And we were assigned our barracks, and the first thing we did was to take those long white bags to put our straw into for our mattress. And a few years ago, I was told those were body bags that the army had. I didn't know that until just a few years ago.

KP: I had never heard of that. That makes sense.

TI: But somebody else told us they were. So anyway, our address was Block 19, barrack 9, apartment C. And my cousins, who had a little girl, my cousin is also my mother and father's first cousin. And he and his wife and their little girl lived in the next room. So there were three of them, so my two brothers had their cots taken into their room. And my father or somebody made a little door there so we can go back and forth between the two rooms, and life began again. And, of course, that was in May, so there was no school until the fall.

KP: What did you, what did you do? How did you occupy your time at first?

TI: Well, at the beginning, of course, just getting acquainted with everybody in the block. So seeing who else is there, there were some who were in our Sunday school, there were some who were in the Buddhist church, children my age and younger, and those are the ones I gravitated to, not to the older ones. I wasn't a... I was still age twelve, and I didn't think of myself as a pre-teen like some young girls my age. So I gravitated to the younger set, not to the older girls. And, of course, everyone had a, had to walk to the bathrooms. It's really not a bathroom, it was a shower room and toilet stalls. And at the beginning, there were no doors on those toilet stalls. I was still young enough not to care. For the teens and young women, that was tough, very hard on them. But I was still a callous youth, I guess. [Laughs] Well, anyway...

KP: So it sounds like when you lived outside of Bakersfield, Lamont, in the Lamont area.

TI: The Lamont area.

KP: That going to Bakersfield and kind of seeing a little bit larger Japanese community there, but it was still small. And suddenly you find yourself in Poston where you're with how many other?

TI: Yes, a lot of young people my age. And so we formed a club. We called ourselves Triletts, and I'm not exactly sure how we got that name, but the purpose of our club -- and there were girls, I was twelve at that time, turning thirteen in September. And I think the youngest girl in our group must have been, oh, eleven, ten maybe, going on eleven. And we had, our purpose was to have parties for the little kids in the block. So that made it fun for us, too. And when school started, I played with my friends, I went to school with my friends, I studied with my friends. And it was an eighth grade class that I went to, but it was a single class. It was not like a junior high class where you go to different classes. And you played until you had you had your meals with your friends. My mother worked in the mess hall, so of course we didn't eat with her. And we saw our families at night, at that time.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.