<Begin Segment 14>

RP: This is tape two of a continuing interview with Tamiko Honda. And Tami, you were just describing some of your first impressions of your first meal at Tanforan. Did it get any better?

TH: I don't believe we really said, "Oh, this is delicious," but we realized it was a hastily set up situation. And our food rations at that time was, the food budget was probably about thirty cents a day for each individual. The thing about Tanforan is, you've heard from others, too, that those of us in the horse stalls were really aghast at the setting. It was smelly. If you swept in the corners, manure would come out. The walls were only about seven feet high, and there were knotholes in between the partitions, so there was no privacy at all. There must have been about 250 in that one horse stall barrack with about, oh, I don't know, forty or so tiny apartments. And so two of the rafters, everything can be heard. There was no privacy. Babies crying, I remember one... first night, I heard a child saying, "I don't like this place, Mom. Can we go home?" And, of course, sobs, but that sob continued throughout the whole stall, the whole building. But it was quite an experience.

RP: Had you ever seen so many Japanese Americans in your life?

TH: [Laughs] I had never seen so many Japanese Americans in one place in all my life. And so we all had that same hangdog look, I guess, wondering, "What is going on here?"

RP: There were nine of you and you were assigned to two horse stalls?

TH: Yes. Each horse stall, they called it an apartment because it had an inner sanctum and an outer sanctum. And the inner sanctum was the original room where the horse, one horse with groom, it was about 9 x 9. And the front of that was his, where his fodder was, and he would stick his head out the window and eat his food there. And then they'd put up a temporary wall in front to make it a two-room apartment, but you could imagine how tiny that was. So we had two of those apartments for nine of us.

RP: And like you were mentioning, you'd see the manure when you swept the floor, and the stench of it?

TH: They hastily covered the dirt floor with a linoleum, but if you swept into the corners you'd get manure, little dead mice. It was not... and it smelled of Lysol.

RP: And so you were there for how long?

TH: Four months.

RP: How did you deal with that situation, lack of privacy, deplorable conditions?

TH: Like everybody else. We had to. We had no choice.

RP: Is shikata ga nai...

TH: Shikata ga nai, that was, that meant, "It can't be helped."

RP: Did you have anybody from the outside visit you in Tanforan?

TH: Yes. We had some teachers who were advisors of our Japanese Students Club visit us at Tanforan a couple times. And, of course, Harry Lee and his wife who were leasing our property, they brought us care packages. And so anything we wanted, we could ask them and they could bring it in, provided it wasn't contraband, of course. But we were very happy to see 'em. But we met them at the grandstand, 'cause Tanforan was a racetrack, and so it was a nice grandstand. So that was the meeting place.

RP: Did you have any responsibilities in the camp to work or volunteer?

TH: Not in Tanforan. It was a temporary place.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.