Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Henry Nishi Interview I
Narrator: Henry Nishi
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Santa Monica, California
Date: January 8, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-nhenry_2-01-0026

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RP: Share with us your first impressions of the camp when you, when you arrived.

HN: Gosh, I think when we arrived in Manzanar, I think it was dark. [Laughs] I think we got there, I think we got there way after dark. Oh, it was cold. And the first thing that we were issued, issued these mattresses to sleep on which we had to fill with hay. And we were assigned... because we had a large group, our cousins and this other family, having this wife and then they had a child, and our cousins, we had three kids, aunt and uncle. And we had, of course, we had five, mom and five of us kids. It was a big group. So they... we got there, instead of, they couldn't assign us to where, our group was supposed to go to a certain block, because we had this group they said, "We'll have to put you in this particular block," which was block twenty-two, which was like a mixture of people from different places. 'Cause we had in our block, Block 22, we had the downtown people. We had Santa Monica people, people from Santa Monica, from west L.A. It was a mixture of different... in Block 22.

RP: Just to backtrack, was there anything memorable about the trip up to Manzanar?

HN: Well, it was, it was a long ride, I remember. And I don't ever remember stopping anyplace. We must have stopped someplace, but, of course, we were young so... I don't know, I don't really remember whether I enjoyed the ride or what, what I was thinking. But I do remember, when we got to Manzanar, it was dark. And, when you're riding in a bus, when you go into an area, you don't know what the surroundings are like.

RP: So what did, how did it affect you the next day when you woke up and you saw where you were?

HN: I don't know how I really felt. I know we had to, I know I felt like we had to do whatever... make the best of it. I know it was really dusty and we had to get adjusted to that situation where... we, at the time, because of the time element, everything was still under construction. Our barracks actually were not completely completed, like they should have been. But they didn't have time to do that. So there was not, there was no, of course, there was no insulation of any kind. It was, the floor, floorboards, the space in between the floorboards were not sealed until later on. They put, they covered it with linoleum. They put in, I think the, the vertical walls, the outside walls, they had the tarpaper on. I don't think we ever added any more than that to it. We did, we did have, we did have a heater. Did we... I don't know what we burnt.

RP: I think it was oil.

HN: We used oil, yeah. Oh yeah, I guess they were oil burners. I know Amy was saying in (Wyoming) they had to use coal. The coal truck came by, not at Manzanar, but in Heart Mountain. She kept saying that they had to rush to get the coal because if they were, if they were kind of hesitant about it then it would be gone. Yeah, yeah, we had oil. We had oil, oil burners. I don't know whether it was kerosene or, yeah.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.