<Begin Segment 4>

JC: Can I go back for just a second to try to understand what it's like? You're like sixteen years old --

FO: Uh-huh.

JC: And your sister is not much older.

FO: No.

JC: And --

FO: But of course, we worked picking berries and such that first summer when we had come from, when I had come from Japan, we went out from the Southworths' home and picked berries at the Caudel Farm, and they still are very good friends, so we've had a little bit of working.

JC: I imagine it being very scary to not have your mother, to be sent to a center where you don't know people, to suddenly get on the train...

FO: And Miss Azalea Peet was there, and she was another benefactor there, Miss Azalea Peet, the missionary lady that I... and she conducted the Sunday school there on Sundays, and she was in general an adviser. And then we had another adviser woman from the farm they call it [inaudible] farm, I just want to call it the farm labor camp, but there was another Caucasian woman who sort of, maybe she was sent from the War Relocation people because there must have been someone who oversaw the group. I'm sort of vague on that, but I remember a Caucasian woman. She must have been through the War Authority.

JC: So tell me about, where are you when you're in this war or in this labor camp, and what's your life like in the labor camp?

FO: Well in the beginning, it was tense, and my sister, mother, and I, we were, we stayed in this tent, but that was very temporary. In Nyssa, Oregon, they set up these tents, but that was, it didn't seem like it was even a whole summer. But then they moved us to a, a camp that had cabins over at, the address was I think Adrian, Adrian, Oregon, and that's where we went to school. I started high school at Nyssa. A bus would come into our labor camp and pick us up. There were a bunch of us and bring us home again. I call that my, my war, prisoner of war days. There was no social life at all. It was just, you get picked up and you go to school and you come home and that was it. And there, I finished my senior year, graduated from Nyssa High School. There were two other fellows from the same camp who graduated with me who were Japanese Americans. And there was a Caucasian classmate who was very nice to me, and I still correspond with her. She, her family was very nice to me. I went to her home on graduation, and we dressed together. And one family that was very nice to me, the Boyles.

JC: Were there some people in that area who were not nice to the Japanese Americans that were there?

FO: Well, I can't say because we had, really had very little contact with the outside community except for being, they made groups, and we went out to work in groups, you know, harvesting, we would toss the sugar beets onto the trucks. We would pick up potatoes, top onions, but the potato picking I remember very well. You'd have to wake up like one a.m., two a.m. in the morning because you're taken out to the field before, well, just barely daybreak because they don't want the sun to be hitting the potatoes that had been dug up by the, by the tractors. And we would be, first, we were putting them in baskets and then putting them in gunnysacks. But the men were, there's potato belt, bud. There's a big belt that you can wear with hooks in the back, and you can hook your gunny sacks, and you hook a whole bunch of gunny sacks in the back, and you take it off and put it on your hook in front, and you're putting in the potatoes, and that way you can work much faster. I remember doing that, but it's a good way to lose weight. That was hard work. But you're through by nine-thirty, ten o'clock. By the time the sun comes out, your work is done. But you're sure, you're going up there early in the morning. But waking in those hours were very hard. And to this day till we used to go clam digging here, but you'd have to leave here at midnight or such, and I'd tell my husband when I remember those Eastern Oregon days when we were forced to awaken so early, it reminds me of those days, and I'm not waking, getting up at one, two o'clock in the morning to do anything.

JC: That was incredibly hard labor for a young girl.

FO: It was, uh-huh.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.