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

<Begin Segment 5>

JA: What were your first impressions when you got off that truck and looked at where you were going to be spending a while?

FK: I can't recall my first impressions, but I still remember, wow, this is a hot dusty place and everybody looked dusty, because it is windy there, you know. And there weren't any roads to speak of, just dirt, dirt, sand, sagebrush, that's all there was, and they had these black tarpapered barracks spotted all over the place and that's it; that was our home. It looked desolate and it looked dusty to me. I kept looking around for familiar faces and didn't see too many of them because I guess in that group I was with, we didn't have any familiar faces. Our friends -- I just made friends in camp, mostly.

JA: What kind of place did you spend that first night?

FK: In one of the barracks that was assigned to us, because when we went there, we were given a canvas bag and told to fill it with straw and that was our bed for that night. And then they gave us army cots, those canvas army cots later on. And sometime after that we got those army steel cots, but in the beginning everything was makeshift, we had to do with just the canvas bags filled with straw.

JA: Did you have any privacy there relative to other people? Did you have your own apartment?

FK: We, we had our own apartment. Of course, at that time it wasn't quite finished, but it did have, ours had plasterboard inside. You know, plasterboard is paneling made out of gypsum covered with cardboard, and we had that in-between each unit. It wasn't finished but we had it all over the top and everything else, it was separated and it was our unit.

JA: A lot of people have talked about the winds in Manzanar.

FK: Oh, that was terrible. It was something you had to live with there, and even after we had been there a number of years, we still have to contend with the wind. Of course, in those two years that we were there, we had laid down a lot of grass, but there was still a lot of sand. In the first couple of days, I remember before we started to do anything about it, we had sand just covering us in the morning, you know, when we got up, our faces would be grimy and all around the windows would be piles of dirt, you know, where the, I mean, the sand would, it kind of came in through the cracks and would be all piled up there. Wind is something you had a lot of over there. We used to have actual dust storms there. Years ago, I understand it wasn't that way because there was a lot of underground water, but Los Angeles had, the city of Los Angeles had used a lot of that subterranean water and that whole area turned to a desert. When the wind blows, sand blows.