Densho Digital Archive - Henry Nishi Interview II (denshovh-nhenry

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RP: What do you remember about the Block 22 in terms of gardens and other maybe recreation facilities that were built in the block? Some blocks had a basketball court or a volleyball court, chin-up bars... what do you, any significant things you remember about that?

HN: Our block, each block had a... I don't know, was it a recreation hall or actually it was a, it was a laundry room or sort of...

RP: There was a recreation building, yes.

HN: It was a recreation hall? We had, our group, we would, we would always join together in the evenings in the rec. hall and we had, we had parties. We had dance parties, and you remember what's his name? Takemoto?

RP: Iwao Takemoto?

HN: Iwao Takemoto. He was, he did all the, he did all our walls inside the rec. hall with his drawings. And we had some, a lot of younger people, younger than I, that liked music. We had a lot of records. We played music, had dances. We would always meet in the evenings and weekends. And that was just exclusively Block 22 people. Not that we didn't allow other blocks to come in, but whenever we had a get-together it was mostly just exclusively our block. It just ended up as kind of a, as a tight group.

RP: What did Mr. Takemoto sketch on the walls? Were they cartoon figures or...

HN: Cartoons, yeah.

RP: The whole building?

HN: Huh?

RP: The whole building?

HN: The inside, yeah. Yeah.

RP: On the, on the plasterboard?

HN: On the plasterboard.

RP: That must have been amazing.

HN: Yeah, it's just too bad we couldn't have saved that.

RP: Yeah, more, sort of the boards, have all the boards and...

HN: Yeah, it was...

RP: You might have to redo one of our barrack buildings, you know.

HN: Yeah.

RP: With all the sketches.

HN: Yeah.

RP: That's too bad that they didn't save those. Hmm. Did you know him at all?

HN: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

RP: He was in Block 22.

HN: He was in the building right across from us. You know that painting that we gave you guys? I think that one that was on that side was his building. But anyway, my daughter got to know Iwao Takemoto quite well because she worked for Warner Brothers on the preservation of animation art. And for whatever reason, she got to know Iwao. I think it was because of, I can't think of those guys that were in animation art. Well, he was an animator, actually. Anyway. through them, because she was in that business, she knew... in fact she was, I saw her the other day, she had lunch with, with his wife just a couple weeks ago.