Densho Digital Archive - Frank Isamu Kikuchi Interview (denshovh-kfrank

<Begin Segment 10>

JA: He was changing the tape there when you were describing what you thought of the food.

FK: Oh, yeah.

JA: Tell me that again.

FK: The food, nobody ever starved, and the food was adequate but very, very boring. And meat was a precious item, you would hardly ever get meat. And what's galling, irritating to me, even now, is when I, I think that even the Times but especially The Herald, I mean, the Hearst newspapers used to always say that, "Here outside were being rationed, Americans are being rationed, and these Japs are getting steaks and chops and eggs and were eating high off the hog," which was an absolute lie. The only... well, let me put it this way: I never had steak in camp, not even once. The only thing resembling steak was they would bring in mutton once in a while and they'd slice that probably with a slicing machine and bread the holy heck out of it so it would be a decent thickness, and that would be, I guess you can call it chicken fried steak. And if you had chicken it would always be chicken a la king, that style or chicken gravy, that style. And you might have weenies or bologna served for dinner once in a while. That's about it for the meat.

JA: Did they ever attempt early on to serve you what they thought Japanese people would eat?

FK: Well, our cooks, who were all Japanese in these mess halls, each block had their own mess hall and their own cook, they would attempt to do the best they could with whatever there was given to them. Food was distributed throughout the camps and it was all brought in by the government, and it was, like I say, it was... I guess it's wholesome and adequate, but then again, it was awfully boring. There wasn't any meat. And as a young guy, I was used to meat, oh, I loved meat, but...

JA: Tell me about the, the gardens that began to spring up.

FK: Oh, yeah, that's something that a lot of the Japanese, I guess they were pretty good in gardening, they used whatever space was available next to the barracks in the shaded area where the sun wouldn't kill it, and we had plenty of water because it was piped in from the Los Angeles water from Owens Lake, I guess. We had to build a channel and it would go into this little holding pond. And we had all the water we wanted, no rationing, ice cold water, spring water, melted snow water is what it was, delicious. But anyway, water was not a problem, so, oh yeah, in spite of the desert we had a lot of victory gardens. And we also had two farms, a north farm and a south farm, and we cultivated a lot of vegetables. We had a surplus so we'd distribute it to, or the WRA would distribute it to other camps.

JA: What inspired those victory gardens?

FK: Oh, because you wanted to grow your own ethnic-type vegetables like nasubi, eggplant, Japanese eggplant, or cucumbers, or whatever, and you know, which isn't normally available in the normal vegetable line of commercially-grown stuff. So we used to have a lot of people growing eggplants, which is used for pickles. Because one thing we had in camp, a lot of, was rice. But you have to have something to eat with rice, so it'd have to be something like pickles, something salty that you can eat rice with. So, everybody used to grow vegetables where they, and they used to make pickles, cucumber pickles, nasubi or eggplant pickles, things of that order.

JA: And there were also some just beautiful flower gardens.

FK: Yeah. I wasn't into flowers, but I know there were certain areas where they had a lot of people get together and they made a nice big garden and they'd keep it up. It takes a lot of work in that area to keep it up, because proof in point, they're all gone, even though the whole system was pretty elaborate where they had water channeled in and they had all kinds of beautiful flowers, they had rocks forming the beds, yeah, those are all gone.