Densho Digital Archive - George Katagiri Interview (denshovh-kgeorge

<Begin Segment 6>

SG: So how long were you in the assembly center?

GK: The assembly center actually operated for over four months, from May through the early part of September because it took them that long for the permanent desert camps to be built. And so most of the people in the assembly center were moved from the assembly center in the early part of September, and most of the people in Portland went from the Portland Assembly Center to Minidoka, Idaho. And I mentioned early on that my mother was a nurse when she was, after she graduated high school in Japan, and she served in Manchuria. And evidently, that was on her record. And so when we got to the assembly center, they needed medical personnel in Tule Lake, and so they picked our family to go to Tule Lake. They picked about four or five families. Out of all the families in the assembly center, they picked four or five families, and it must have been because of her medical record. They needed nurses in Tule Lake. But here's an Issei woman who can't speak English and who's never practiced nursing in the United States, although she was a midwife for several years. And for that reason, we were only in the Portland Assembly Center for over a month, and we were shipped down to Tule Lake. And that must have been the reason because we were housed in the block that housed all of the dentists and the doctors and the nurses in Tule Lake. So there I was, one of the few people from Portland, you know. All my friends remained in the Portland Assembly Center and went on to Minidoka, Idaho. So I end up in Tule Lake not knowing anybody. And eventually, another girl that I happened to know from Portland moved to Tule Lake, and she was the only friend I had in Tule Lake.

And there are a lot... not a lot. Most of the people in Tule Lake came from California, and other groups came from Oregon and Washington. But the California kids were there first, and they had seemed to have a chip on their shoulder. So I get there, and I feel like here I am all by myself, walking around, and here are these California kids. They've got sleeked down hair and wearing jeans, and they're riding around in trucks. And for some unknown reason, they compose these songs, very derogatory songs about any kid from Oregon or Washington, you know. They're going to beat their blocks off or something like that. And so initially, I thought, "What am I getting into?" you know. I want out of this place. And once the high school started, it turned out that most of it was all bark and no bite because when I got into the classes, I could speak English better than most of those kids could. And just the fact that I seemed to be more literate in the English language, I gained respect, and nobody tried to push me around.

But those first few weeks had me concerned. But Tule Lake was not a nice place to... but it was better than the assembly center. It's composed of hundreds of barracks, hundreds of barracks, and they were divided into blocks, and each block had about fourteen barracks, and one larger building for each block was the mess hall, and they had two rows of about seven barracks. And in the center of those rows were extra buildings for the latrine and the showers and the laundry and things of this type. So we moved into, the barracks were approximately 20 feet by 100 feet and divided into four or five or six apartments of different sizes, and we got, our family of five got an end apartment. And so when we moved in there with our belongings, all there was was five army cots, a potbellied stove, and a lightbulb from the ceiling. And if you wanted to sit down, you sat on the floor. And so immediately, they had kept the scrap lumber from building all the barracks in the camp, and we could go to these lumber piles that measured 30, 40 feet high and grab lumber. And they had saws and tools, and so everybody had to build their chairs and tables and bookcases and knickknack shelves and closets and screens to separate the bedroom area from the living room area. And there was no water. So with that one lightbulb, we had to make a lot of adjustments. And of course, it was very inconvenient to use the latrine or the washroom or anything else. And when you keep in mind that most of these camps were in the deserts, the deserts became very cold in the wintertime and very hot in the summertime, and Tule Lake was an old lake bed. And in the summertime, I swear the temperature got up to 120 degrees, and it was 120 degrees in the barrack as well as out of the barrack. And it was very dusty, so there were dust storms frequently. And the dust came in through, the barracks weren't built very nicely. The dust came in through the cracks, around the doors, and around the windows. Everything got covered with dust. And I remember talking to other kids with mud forming around their lips and their eyelids, and you know, it was a little amusing, but it just shows how awful the place was. In the wintertime, it was freezing. You go to the latrine and the showers. And by the time you got back to your apartment, your hair was freezing, you know. It was frozen with icicles, and that's the way it was.

And we formed a high school there, and everything had to be organized. In Tule Lake, we named it the Tri-State High School naturally because we had kids from Oregon, Washington, and California. And it started out in, a couple of blocks were set aside for the high school, but there were no desks, no textbooks to start with, and, but everybody chipped in and did the best they could, and I really respected the teachers. Many of the teachers came from the internees. The engineers became your physics instructor or your math instructor. And there were a lot of internees that had completed a year of college English, and so they taught English and composition and so on. And there were a lot of volunteers from outside, the Caucasians. And these are the people I really respected because they came from someplace, and they had a special place to live right on the outskirts of the camp. But still, they had to live, next to the camp for a year or whatever it was, and many of them came from the Friends Church. And so I think many of us since then had very warm feelings toward people who were members of the Friends Church because we know that they, they showed by their actions, their feelings toward the Japanese Americans.

But it was not the best place. But if you wanted to see the good parts of the camp, you could. You can get up early in the morning and see the sunrise, and it's beautiful, just beautiful, the cold morning sunrise with the pink tinge on the clouds. Then a few miles away were the Tule Lake beds that housed millions of migrating birds. And when the hunters were out there, you can see this black cloud rise from the horizon of just millions of birds. That was a very beautiful sight. And Tule Lake, we had next to Tule Lake was a Castle Mountain or Castle Rock. And in the wintertime, I don't know where but somebody got a hold of a toboggan. So a bunch of us went out there, and we had more fun sliding down Castle Rock on this toboggan. Then on the opposite side of Castle Rock was this Abalone Mountain, and it was appropriately named Abalone because it look just like an abalone. And so, there are good things about the camp. We, I remember going out and picking potatoes for the ranchers nearby, and we made extra money by doing that. So again, camp life, played a lot of touch football and a lot of baseball. And again, camp turned out to be what you made it. And as I read the diaries of some of the Isseis, once again, I think many of the diaries of the women were quite positive, and they were adjusting well. But when you read the diaries of the men, I read the diary of one man, and he always started out the entry of each day by saying, today, the weather was, sunny or cold or rainy or whatever, or, and then he'd say, well, it's just like the weather back home. In one or two sentences, he'd talk about the weather. And then the next sentence, he would say, "Another boring day," and that's the entry, day after day, "another boring day." And I think this kind of sums it up how many of the Issei men who were used to working so hard how they reacted to internment.