<Begin Segment 9>

MR: After the assembly center, what camp were you sent to?

MB: In August, I think it was, it was in the fall of the year or late summer, they would, we were put on the train and sent to Minidoka, Idaho. And that first day in camp after they assigned us our room, and we had, the truck had just unloaded us and put us in the room, and the military police came. Two of them came in the jeep, and they wanted Mabel, Mabel Boggs or Mabel Shoji. "I'm Mabel Shoji." "Well, come with us." They put me in the jeep, and then they took me down to the administration building, and they put me in a room all by myself, and they left me in that room for three and a half hours. There was a door, there was a window, but nothing else, just one chair, and then there was a military police outside guarding my door. I didn't know that until I went outside. After three and a half hours, the military police, a different one came and said for me to follow him, so then the, him and the one that was guarding me followed me and took me to a room where there was a table, and three gentlemen were sitting there, and I can't remember whether they were all in civilian clothes or whether one was in an army uniform. I don't remember. But anyway, they sat me down and interrogated me. After six and a half minutes of interrogating me, they decided I wasn't a spy, and then they took me to another room. And when I entered that room, there were three girls and two boys that I recognized instantly. They and I had returned to America from Japan to Seattle. We had come home on the same ocean liner, the last liner to Seattle, Washington, from Japan, and they, all three, all of us had been in Japan for longer than three years, and they thought that we were spies, and that's why they were questioning us. Anyway, we had a lot of fun talking. And then after that, we separated, and they let us go back.

About, after we'd been in camp for about a year and a half, they decided that we were okay to go to the outside. We could relocate, and a lot of people did. And since I was going to college, I thought, well, I would like to resume my college education, and I applied to Washington University in Saint Louis. That was my number one choice, and I got a letter of rejection. I applied to another school, got rejected from it. Third school, fourth school, I tried fifteen schools, and every one of them rejected me. The reason? We aren't taking any more students," "our quota is filled," "your grades not good enough," various reasons. Well, that kind of bothered me. My best friend in high school left to go to college, and she didn't have, I had better grades than she did. She got accepted, why didn't they accept me? Well, it wasn't the same college, but you know, and that bothered me. So I wrote to my best friend, a white girl, Caucasian girl, that was in my class at Saint Helen's Hall, a junior college, and every school that rejected me, she applied, I mean, every school that wrote and told me that their classes were filled, they weren't taking anymore students, she wrote, she applied to their school, to the same school, and they took her. That was funny. I couldn't understand. So after war ended and in 1986, I retired from work in 1985 because that was the year I turned sixty-five. My husband is younger than I am. He worked another year and retired in 1986. And after he retired, we spent four months just traveling the whole United States and spent six days in Washington, D.C. While we were in Washington, D.C, I visited the National Archives. I wanted to find out why I was ostracized, why I wasn't accepted in this school. And there were three people there, a man and two ladies, and they'd bring me different things to look at but nothing that, they never brought me anything that I wanted to really see because I wasn't finding out why I was being ostracized. And then noontime came, and the man and one lady left. And my husband was there, Monty was with me, but he went off in a different room, and I was in this room by myself looking, going through these magazines and all the papers they had given me, and this lady came in and said, "You were on the blacklist," and that's all she said, and that was the reason, you know, they wouldn't even let me out of camp. They didn't want me out of camp. That's why none of the schools had taken me, and well, that was it. I was ostracized, I mean I was on a blacklist, and I wished I had kept up being friends with all those that came back from Japan on the same ship that I did. I wish I had kept up, you know, with them because then I could ask them if any of them had tried leaving camp. See, they kept me from leaving camp. I wondered if they did that to the others too.

MR: The camp was quite a large place though, and so you lost track of them there?

MB: They had, the place had military, the fence, a military place all around. One side was bounded by the Snake River, and the Snake River is swift. I mean, you can't, if you're in it, you'd be swept downstream as people were that went out to swim in it. And let's see, I guess two people were killed and swept downstream. And where the water didn't flow so fast, there was a fence there. And I don't know why, but these older people, three men, I don't know how they ever got across that swift flowing river, but they'd go out and buy stuff and bring it back into camp. But I know while we were in camp, those early months for about a year I guess, I don't know how long, they came to count heads. There were supposed to be three hundred or thereabouts in each block. Each block had ten barracks; kitchen or dining hall, and then the laundry room, and they came to count heads in the morning and again at night. And the three men that used to go out and come back to camp, what they did was they'd be there when they, they were counted. And then while the military police weren't watching, they'd slip around the block and be counted again, you know, and they got away by doing that. They had... that's it.

MR: What kinds of things would they bring back to camp from these shopping trips they would take?

MB: Oh, okay. What they brought home, brought back was rice, sugar. What they were doing was making sake, the Japanese wine, and we often wondered if they went to the same grocery store because I want you to know a grocery store man would wonder why or what they wanting all this sugar for. But we, those of, the rest of us used to go and try to look to see how they were getting across that swift river. You know, they could throw a rope or chain, something across the river, but there wasn't anything over on the other side of the river they could tie that rope to, and the people couldn't swim it because the river was so swift, you know. We never did find out how they cross, they got across that river, but they made sake.

MR: Did they share the sake?

MB: Well, there was a group of them that drank the sake. And the same group used to eat, they'd go out and hunt for mushrooms, and they'd cooked them. And a lot of them were, some were poisonous. They didn't know the poisonous one from the good one. And what they used to do, they'd throw in a silver dollar into the pot. If the dollar turned black, it was poisonous, so they threw it out. If the silver dollars didn't change color, it was safe to eat.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.