<Begin Segment 12>

RP: What was the experience of going to the latrines like for you?

KK: Not pleasant, you know, because at first there were no partitions between stalls. And there was like a long trough to brush your teeth and I remember the showers were very grim looking because they were, you know, concrete, gray and it was very, I mean, communal so. As children, you know, you don't really mind that so much but I'm sure it must have been very difficult for the older people. The one thing I remember we were talking about this recently, some friends and I, one of the kind of remedies that the Japanese used was yaito, where they put these little, I can't remember what they're called, but powder and they'd light them and they would be on certain pressure areas. And so we'd see these ladies with brown spots all over their backs and I think that was the scarring from this remedy.

RP: How would you spell that?

KK: Yaito, Y-A-I-T-O, I believe, yaito, romanized.

RP: Like an herbal powder?

KK: It's different from moxa, do you know what moxa is? Where they put pressure like use little cups and heat it and put it on you, but it's similar to that I think. They used, I can't remember what it was called, but some kind of granule, maybe it was herbal. We saw all shapes and sizes of people in the shower room. [Laughs]

RP: Did you observe how people adjusted or tried to adapt to the lack of privacy?

KK: I think it probably was very hard. As a young child, you know, you don't notice things like that or (at least) I didn't.

RP: How about you said that you used to eat at some of the other mess halls with your friends, how would you characterize the food at Manzanar?

KK: The food? I was a very picky and finicky eater and the first night we got there, they gave us those GI Joe type metal things and you had to balance that and they plopped rice on it and then this big huge cube of something, turned out to be egg foo young and then they put... I don't remember there being any vegetables but they put kadota figs, canned figs on top of that. [Laughs]. I think I just sat there and looked at the plate, I don't think I ate anything. And for years after, I couldn't eat pancakes, I didn't like pancakes at all 'cause they used to have that with, know you, frequently and so I think I used to perhaps take a fruit and the boxes of cereal and eat those dry. And they had mutton quite often and we would know when they were going to have mutton or lamb, they called it lamb but it was mutton and it was horribly smelly.

RP: Had you ever eaten lamb before?

KK: Yes, my mother used to make it. I couldn't eat liver, I didn't like liver, so my mother used to make lamb chops or pork chops for me as a child, as a young child before going to camp.

RP: You talked about sweets and --

KK: Sweets, mainly fruits and when we went to the movies they were mostly in the summer time, they would have corn in the mess hall and they were good but they were really big so we would be able to take out the kernels individually and so we would take that as snack. We'd take the cob of corn and then take one kernel at a time and eat. But we didn't really have a whole lot of sweets, I think, you know, we got them at Christmastime, I don't remember other (sweets). We had, you know, apples and bananas and oranges.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.