<Begin Segment 17>

RP: You shared with us the story before we started the interview about...

YW: A player on the team?

RP: One of the players on the team.

YW: When my kids finished high school -- was it before high school? He was a summer student. He was lookin' for a job, and... what company was that? Was that Sylvania?

Off camera: Magnavox.

YW: Magnavox? Magnavox, in Torrance, hired him as a summer gopher. You know, hire a kid. And one day he comes home to me, he says, "I met another Japanese fellow who's a permanent employee there and his name was Jack Kitahata." I said, "Jack Kitahata?" I said, "I wonder if that's the same guy that used to play football in camp." I said, "Ask him when you go back to work tomorrow whether he was ever called Jackson Kitahata." So my kid comes home, he says, "Guess what, Dad? You hit it right on the nose. That was Jackson Kitahata." He says he was shocked to hear that, I knew a name like that. He asked my son, "Where'd you get that name?" He says, "Nobody's ever called me that since I left camp." He said, "Well, my dad used to watch you play football when you were in camp, if you're the same guy." He says yeah. He says, "You used to be a terrific fullback for the team." The guy's jaw dropped. He said, "I don't believe." Here it is, thirty, forty years later, right? And his past was catchin' up with him. Turns out Mr. Kitahata had a cousin or a brother whose wife that, my wife worked with in the Girl Scouts, so we're closin' the loop along the past. It was interesting. Says, "Yeah, you used to be quite a football player." And he used to play fullback. I said, "But he wasn't all that big." Said, "Well yeah, neither was the team." It was, that team was probably more like a B football team, size wise, because all the Japanese kids were short. They weren't very big. But he was the fullback on that team. My son said, "I shocked my coworker by askin' him if he was ever called Jackson Kitahata." Said, "Nobody's called me that in all these years. Where'd you get that?" And he told him the story. He says, "I can't believe it." So I went to pick him up one day and I met him. I said, "You shocked that we knew your name?" [Laughs] Small world, right?

RP: Gettin' smaller. Do you remember judo or sumo wrestling in the camp?

YW: We saw sumo wrestling. In fact, Victor Matsui, the coach for football, was the top ranked sumo wrestler in camp. He was quite an athlete. He was a pretty big guy and there weren't too many people that could take him on. But this thing was done maybe several blocks from home. They put up a pit out there, a raised platform, and they put that together. And my dad loves sumo, so we used to go down there and watch whenever they had a meet and typically Victor Matsui would be the winner. Yeah, he was, I remember that. But that was practiced whenever they had an opportunity. Now, the other martial arts things like kendo --

RP: And judo?

YW: -- I didn't see those. They, they may have occurred, but I was not aware of that. Yeah. All I remember is football and sumo.

RP: You remember celebrating Christmas in Rohwer?

YW: Every block had a Christmas tree and the Christmas presents were provided by support from the outside. I remember one year getting a book and the book was provided by a church from Boston, Massachusetts, so I guess the Christian churches went out and solicited donations for these things. And that's how I got to reading. Hey, this is good. I can read. I don't have a TV, right? What's a TV? So I learned to start reading books and the library was my best friend, 'cause whenever I was sick I'd have a book on hand to read. Lassie Come Home was the first big book I had a chance to read.

RP: In camp?

YW: In camp. Right.

KP: We have that, a reproduction of that version. We sell it in our bookstore.

YW: What is that?

KP: Lassie Come Home.

YW: Oh, good.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.