Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Osamu Mori Interview
Narrators: Osamu Mori
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Concord, California
Date: April 14, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-mosamu-01-0008

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RP: You first drove into Santa Anita on April 3rd in this caravan. What did you see and what did you feel?

OM: I don't recall looking out, you know, on the side or anything. I was riding, obviously, in back of the truck. You know, you're going through residential areas, this and that. It was very uneventful. When I got to Santa Anita I kind of woke up and said, I've never seen such a huge place for horse racing... I'd never seen anything like that before. Then you're brought back to earth when you... they said, this is the place you're going to live. They didn't say for how long but it was a horse stable. You got your straw mattress, you know. I think the worse thing was the floor, it was, you know, asphalt, newly laid asphalt, right over the, what was that, I don't think they bothered to even clean it. They just laid asphalt. It wasn't... I guess today they have machines or portable machines where you can stamp it down, tamp it down. Then they didn't even have that, they put it down as much as they could but it was so soft that they crisscrossed like that, the cots, canvas cots, that would go right through the asphalt. Then you started getting some odor. And then they didn't even bother to paint the stalls, it was just... you could see, you know, it's like this and then there's a wall in between the two but it's not all the way to the top. It stops about five, six feet from the top so you can hear from the other side. There's apartments, stalls on the other side. Apartment, you see I said that. [Laughs] But it's stalls on the other side and you could hear from that side and you could hear from the other, both sides.

But we stayed there about a month and then we were moved to out in the parking lot, in the parking lot, yeah, to barracks in the parking lot. They had a whole series of... in the parking lot barracks. And that wasn't too good either because as it got warmer and warmer, we went in April and by the time it gets summer months, the asphalt starts to get pretty warm. One of the bad things, either place, was the sanitation. They had... it was a cesspool system but, you know, for that many people that's just not the way to go because you're overflowing all the time. And can you imagine Santa Anita parking lot when the cesspool starts to overflow? I mean, gee, terrible. I don't know what... I guess the cesspool system is supposed to go into the ground, seep into the ground. But there's just too much activity. It used to overflow anyway.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.