Densho Digital Archive - George Uchida - Leo Uchida Interview (denshovh-ugeorge

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RP: Can you share with me your feelings about your camp experience, given that you were relatively young, how do you see it looking back from your sixty-six years later, George?

GU: Well, like you said, I was young then. And I can relate it as a young person. And it was the first time I ever got a train ride, the first time I ever got a bus ride, and the first time I'd ever seen something like a scorpion. And we had snow in Manzanar one year. Lot more snow than we ever got in Sacramento. So, and so as a young person, it was like a camp for me. I didn't have all the negative feelings that this camp was, meant to the older people. It's only later that I started to look at it from my older siblings' and my parents' point of view, that this was, must have been a really, really hard experience for them, especially for my parents. When they had worked so hard on the farm and raising such a large family, and then having to sell it for, you know, real small amount of money for what they had worked for. So that's, that's the two point of view that I have as far as camp life goes. To me, it also meant that the Japanese community, where they were concentrated at each particular town, they got, made 'em spread out and join other communities. And so I think in that way, it was good. In other ways, having to sacrifice all those things that they worked for, and that was the bad part of it. And from my point of view, I have to say it was not a negative experience for me.

RP: Leo, how do you feel about it?

LU: Well, when I first started to go to high school, I thought, well, I was going to be some kind of artist. And the first year in high school, that was before camp, I wasn't exposed to that art class. It was, I kind of liked it, but when I went to Manzanar, they didn't have any, no good art classes at all. So I just quit about art. And as far as the camp goes, I did have a lot of fun trying to play baseball and basketball. The main thing was, like the farm, you didn't have to work all the time. [Laughs] You had a lot of spare time. And then, you know, it's like living in the city, compared to living in the farm, so you're in close contact with everybody. That made it a little more sociable. And, you know, at times, I never, I never thought about war going on. And then met some, lot of new people, compared to just living on the farm. So it was, well, really a different life from living on the farm.

RP: And you get together with those people every year.

LU: Yeah.

GU: You know, that's true in a sense, and yet, when I go to the reunion, it's usually just the immediate friend that I have from my hometown. Yeah, I really don't associate with all the other people that are from the camp, unless for some reason, we got put on the same table and we had something in common. Other than that, it's usually just within the immediate friends from the hometown. I don't really, I'm not that sociable type of person. So I don't mingle with all the other people. Once in a while, I see somebody that I remember in there, and have conversation with that person. But most of the time, it's just within the hometown friends.

LU: You know the thing with this reunion? It's getting so that you go there, they all changed, so you don't know who they are anymore. You know, I can't recognize anybody.

RP: From high school?

LU: Yeah.