<Begin Segment 5>

RP: So in all your travels around the camp, places that you went to, what kind of feelings or opinions did you form about what you saw at that age? Let's start with the barracks. You went, you visited your friends in their barracks. You saw the rooms and stuff, and how did you feel about those rooms versus where you lived?

CT: I didn't not have that mindset. My main interest was the people. My mindset was not what kind of house you had. That just didn't enter my mind at all, and to this very day it still doesn't enter my mind. I don't care what kind of home you had. I care about the people in the home, so I never had any thoughts about whether their barracks were inferior and whether ours was superior. That just never entered my young mind in those days.

RP: What about the environment itself, where the camp was? Did, you were affected by the heat or the storms? A lot of people talk about the dust and everything else. You remember any of that when you were at Manzanar?

CT: No. I don't remember any, I remember snow. We had snow.

RP: Was that the first time you'd actually seen snow or been in snow?

CT: Yeah.

RP: And so how did you react?

CT: I loved it. I loved the snow, and it seems like before it snowed it was freezing. We were cold to our bones, but when it starts snowing it seems like there was an insulation or something and it would lift that horrible frost. I don't know whether that's true or not, but that's the way I felt. And, but I liked it. Now, when I felt the weather is when I went to the pilgrimage, I said, oh my, this is awful. This is so hot. But I never felt any discomfort, as far as I can remember, of weather. None.

RP: So in your experiences at Manzanar, you never, you never recall any older parents or adult casting any stigma attached to you being an orphan?

CT: Absolutely not. Never. I didn't feel this until after I left camp, and when the kid says, "Are you a welfare child?" This is after camp now, and I said, "Well, what's a welfare child?" And he says, "That's when you receive charity," and it made such a profound difference in my thinking after that, that I would even lie to all my girlfriends that I'm not a welfare child. I would even forego the hot lunches that they gave you and I would take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every day, just to show them I was not a welfare child, because it was such a stigma. But the other people made it a stigma, not me. But I says, oh well, it must be a shameful thing to be on welfare, so when the welfare lady told me at age eighteen that I was off the rolls of welfare I says, "Good, I'm glad." I don't, I was greatly relieved that I was off of welfare. It's not like today where some, some of them wear it like a badge of honor. I thought it was so shameful in those days, just that really bothered me, the welfare, to be on welfare.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.