<Begin Segment 6>

RP: In one of your stories that you wrote up about your time at the Children's Village you referred to it as the happiest, happiest time of your childhood.

CT: It was the happiest. It was.

RP: In, in a sense, discussing this over the phone with you, you said actually not having a family was liberating in the sense that you didn't have to take on all the troubles and difficulties that parents had to face in a place like Manzanar. Can you explain that a little?

CT: Absolutely. That's what I was explaining to Rosie Kakuuchi, whom I just recently met and a lovely person who lives in Las Vegas, and after I read her biography I says, "You know, Rosie, I don't understand people of Manzanar. They're setting us up in panel and talking about our, our Children's Village life and all that, but I think I had it -- I'm not speaking for everybody, I'm speaking for myself -- I had it much easier than whole families." The whole families consisting of mother, father, brothers, sisters, because after the bombing of Pearl Harbor I can imagine the parents, all of a sudden everyone is told they're gonna be evacuated to one place and the parents who were Isseis, the first generation who were not yet citizens, I can imagine that they were so frightened that they might be separated from their children by being deported and the children would be, would not have their mother and father again. And naturally this would be discussed in the family setting, which would give the children more anxiety than me, who was in a well protected orphan, orphanage and who didn't have to listen to all the bad things that was happening at, at the time, such as the posters calling "Japs," "Japs" to be evacuated and all the horror stories I heard later, that they had to sell their possessions for a dime, for a refrigerator or something like that. I heard these horror stories and how they were kicked off their lands for no cause, so I says I can imagine how hard it was hard for the private family and those are the people I really have empathy with, but I also have empathy for the older orphans, for people whose families were torn from them and they were just pushed into orphanages. I said that's horrifying. But as far as I was concerned it was a walk in the park. We got to go on the bus and sing songs and go to camp. That was it.

RP: That's what you remember about your trip to Manzanar?

CT: Yes, we were on the bus and I thought it was a truck, but we were singing. We always sang. And it was, it was a lot of fun.

RP: Do you remember soldiers on the bus at all?

CT: Yeah, and I remember soldiers on the towers, but, and soldiers on horses, and I thought they were nice. They were nice to me. And we would test them by running out of the barbed wire and then they would come and tell us, "Okay, kids, get back in." They wouldn't point a gun at us or anything like that, but they knew what we were doing. We were testing them. But I didn't find them threatening at all, so, but we used to have fun with 'em. They used to put us on their horse and let us ride, with them of course, the rangers -- not the rangers, the soldiers.

RP: The policemen?

CT: Yeah. So that's what I remember. It was, and then I remember lots of times we were permitted to go off the base, and there was a brook, water brook, and we were able to play in the water brook. I remember that so vividly.

RP: This was the whole --

CT: But then we were told no, you weren't allowed off the base, but we were. We went by trucks.

RP: You went a fair distance away from the camp?

CT: It was...

RP: To the, to a creek somewhere.

CT: Yeah, to a creek. Maybe it wasn't a long distance, but to us it was a ride in the bus, or the truck.

RP: A field trip.

CT: Yeah, a field trip.

RP: And did the whole Village go on these trips or just one group of kids?

CT: I think just one group. It wasn't the whole Village. It was just one group that said we could go and we could go fishing or something like that. We didn't have fishing poles or anything, but it was nice memories. I just remember it as nice memory. So I told one of the interviewers, but this was maybe ten years ago -- this was when Dr. Hansen and his crew were interviewing us, Lisa -- and I told her, I says, I said, "They're not gonna use my interview." I said, "There's no way." I said, "Because this country likes gloom and doom and struggles and I can't give you that, to be truthful with you. I just can't."

RP: All you can do is be true to your own experience and that's what you had.

CT: That was it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.