<Begin Segment 12>

KP: What did you think when you first saw Tule Lake?

TT: Well, I thought, gee, I said, "Jesus, God, what's this?" Because it was more uniform. You could see it wasn't slapped together. The guard towers, gee, it wasn't just a makeshift affair. It had a searchlight on top, and it had a chain link fence, and it had a barbed wire fence, then they that overhang so you can't get out, things like that on top. I knew right then, I said, "Oh, boy." [Laughs] It was eye-opening, I'll put it that way. You picture it as like a prison. But we had fun. We used to give those MPs a bad time. You know, you're seventeen years, sixteen, seventeen.

KP: What'd you do?

TT: Oh, well, they had a main fence here, they had a little fence, a warning fence, and what we used to do is a bunch of us guys go there, the guard towers every three hundred feet, so that's we used to do. Run up by that warning fence, we'd stand there and the MP would get excited, then we'd give him a one-finger salute and we'd walk... [laughs]. But the best thing is that, we used to, another thing, we used to go over there and jump on the other side, "We're just going to the other side of that fence," because it's low, you could jump over there. We'd go over there, and boy, the MP get by, and pretty soon we'd see the dust flying and we knew a jeep or somebody coming with a jeep, so we'd just go on the other side, and once we got on the other side, we scattered. Hell, they didn't know who in the hell we were. We all look alike, so they didn't know. [Laughs] But if you're incarcerated, you do anything to get after the authority as per se.

KP: Do you remember what month you got into Tule Lake?

TT: I think it was May. I think it was May.

KP: So school hadn't been, wasn't organized or started yet?

TT: Oh, we had nothing. We had no school in Marysville because we only stayed a month, it was a temporary camp. Once we got to Tule Lake, even then, they didn't get school going until, it took about six months, a year, before they got the school going. Because they had to get the teachers. We had some good teachers there, but then we had a lot of these college grads, and people that was going to be a teacher, so they started teaching. Then we got books, I think the Quakers or something, they sent a lot of supply in to us. But we had school there. And I thought we had to, like I said, no chores, that's all we had to do was go to school.

KP: So that first summer you got there, you chased girls, harassed the MPs, and tried to find the best food.

TT: Yeah.

KP: What else did you do? [Laughs]

KP: That's about it. [Laughs] Because as far as the entertainment, towards the end we started getting movie once in a while, they used to hold dance in the mess hall, things like that. But that was, it took over a year to get organized, because we had to get teacher support. We had a lot of whatchacall, we had a lot of sports, though. We had, like baseball, we didn't have too much football, we had a lot of baseball. But like our Issei parents, that sumo wrestling, that sumo, we used to have that Fourth of July. That was a big thing, they used to... they used to make a typical wrestling ring, they build up, built it up high, they did that. But outside of that...

KP: Did your father work in camp?

TT: Oh, yeah. My father was a railway express agent. Don't forget, it was like a little village, though. We had a tractor shop, truck shop, then we had a warehouse, distribute food and things like that, (...) carpentry shop. It was like a city by itself. But we didn't have no medical insurance, it was no problem because the doctor's only getting paid nineteen dollars a month. [Laughs] Then the professional people were getting nineteen, next one was sixteen, and like flunky like us, we used to get paid twelve dollars a month. What did you do when you were in camp?

TT: Well, like us, we were sixteen, we get a job either working unloading the truck warehouse, unloading the truck from the warehouse, boxcars that used to come into camp, unload the boxcar or shovel coal. If you had to shovel coal to haul it on the truck, we had to dump it to each block. But you ate pretty good, though, because if you work in the (coal car), they had a twenty-four hour kitchen for the night crew people, and we used to get pretty good food compared to the... so you wanted to eat middle of the night, you work on the coal crew. But that's one thing. As long as you... that's all you had to do, was go to school. You didn't have no chores. So in that sense, it was pretty easy.

KP: What classes or teachers did you find most interesting while you were there?

TT: Oh, I had a good math class. Math teacher was good. And then we had another... I can remember the one, I think she was a math or history, but Mrs. Gunderson. I remember that. She was a good teacher.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.