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JA: Tell me about what grades you taught and what subjects.

MS: I taught fourth grade, everything. And when I first go there, we didn't have as many books as we should, so I called one of my professors at UCLA and asked her, "What do I do? 'Cause I need book on certain subjects, and they're just not available to get." And she says, "Well, go to the butcher store in Lone Pine and buy a big roll of butcher paper, and buy some crayons, and make up your stories as you go along, and put your math on it and so on." So I'd write a story about the Westward Movement, and we would use that for reading, for English, for spelling, for language arts, and then we'd have the math on the other side, then we had long recesses.

JA: Were there other things that the kids wanted to know about, did you ever discuss why they were in camp or any of those kinds of things?

MS: Not too much with the younger children. With the older ones, you'd talk about, talk about it with some of the teachers, the Japanese teachers. I had, Mariko Hoshiyama taught fifth grade next to me, and on the other side of me was the nursery school. And my classroom, this isn't a classroom, and we used to discuss it. Although she wasn't bitter, but she was not happy with the situation. And, of course, I don't think any of 'em were happy, but some were more accepting of it, with a better understanding, some were very bitter.

JA: Alisa told me you had to improvise when you did the Pledge of Allegiance.

MS: [Laugh] We didn't have a flag, so we used to salute to an empty corner. Finally, one day, one of the boys said, "Well, why don't we draw a flag?" I said, "Well, all right," so I managed to get some art paper, and we started out to draw the American flag. One little boy had a hard time getting thirteen stripes on twelve inches of paper that he, he had available to him. [Laughs] So he turned his paper over, drew a circle, colored it white inside. Well, actually, he drew, he drew the flag of Japan, red inside, and when he, I got real tickled, he had a half-finished American flag, a Japanese flag on the other side. So I took it with me to show the superintendent of schools, and when I came back, the little boy came running up to me and says, "Did you show that to the superintendent?" I said, "Well, yes, I did." He said, "Well, it's not finished." So he took the paper, scraped off the red from the Japanese flag, put little petals around it, colored it orange, put a stem on it, put some leaves and a butterfly up at the corner, and he made it, simpler out of it.

JA: That's pretty neat.

MS: I kept that paper for a long time, but finally it wore out.

JA: Did you ever hear from anybody on the upper grades who had to teach civics or things about the Bill of Rights, Constitution? Were there any issues about that?

MS: No, not really. You know, thinking back, it's been so long, I can't even hardly remember who some of the teachers were. There was a blind man who taught, we had a blind teacher there, and I think he taught civics.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.