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MR: You could talk about your time at, is it Pinedale Assembly Center?

HY: Well, Pinedale Assembly Center is located five miles south of the Fresno, California. And interesting enough, there was also a camp at Pinedale, another "assembly center." Well, let me back up. Originally, there were fifteen "assembly centers." One of them was the Manzanar Assembly Center which also became a WRA center, War Relocation Authority center. And then the sixteen "assembly centers," they were staging points to funnel, to concentrate the people to put into smaller, not smaller, to less number of concentration camp, that was the WRA centers. So there were ten of those. So the Pinedale Assembly Center was mainly for the Pacific Northwest people, mainly for Oregon. So in Pinedale, the people who came there was from Hood River, Hood River area. This is the, includes the Dalles people and Dallesport people, Mosier people, and all of Hood River. And when I say people, I mean Japanese Americans. But also, there were people from different places because the camp, the single camp in Washington was called "Camp Harmony." I don't know who called it Camp Harmony, but it was in Puyallup. And there were too many people there, so they couldn't take them all to Camp Harmony, so they funneled not all of them, but most of the Japanese from the Tacoma and Fife area into Pinedale, California, also. And almost all of them from the Yakima Valley like Sue Sakai and her family were all funneled into, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I take it back. They went to Portland Assembly Center. But the Vashon Islanders, which is an island in the Puget Sound, they were all sent to Hood River too. So we had a quite a mix of people, and some of them even came from California. I forgot exactly where they were from. Part of them I think were from the Sacramento area. But the Pinedale camp is a pretty small camp. It's an assembly center, holds about five, no, four thousand people. And when we went there, it was about the middle of May in 1942. And when we left Hood River it was a nice climate. You know, it was not hot. It wasn't raining then either, so, but when we got to Pinedale, oh boy, it was hot. It must have been in its hundreds, and you know, Northwesterners are just not used to that kind of temperature. So I remember we got there, one of the earlier arrivals from Hood River, there was about five hundred of us, and I remember when the Tacoma people were bussed in, we went to the train station at Fresno, and then they were bussed to, five miles to the Pinedale Assembly Center. And I remember seeing a lot of the elderly people, particularly women, fainting from the heat because it was hot, and there was no shade. We're standing out in the hot and being processed and signed in and so on.

So that was the beginning of camp life, and it was a disturbing and yet at the same time, a highly exciting time because tremendous stimulus going on. Remember, I'm a seventeen-year old boy. I think I know everything, I got the world by its tail. Of course I don't, but I thought I did. And I said, "Oh, man, look at all these Japanese people," I didn't know how many, but thousands and thousands. They look like me. They got haircuts like me. They look like me. They use accents like me, smell like me. They dress like me. They think like me, and here, we're all put in one place together, hot, hot. And everything is chaotic and a mess. It's dusty, and it's hot, and we're lined up for everything. We're lined up to take a shower, lined up to eat, lined up to get our medical inspections which is practically a farce, and lined up for everything. That was one thing that I'm very impressed, and the other thing was the food terrible. In the beginning because, they weren't, these were army camps. They were built on army construction plans and the barracks and you know, an army is general, in those days is all men, so it was built for men. And of course, men take showers in groups, like ten, fifteen, twenty men in a group in a big shower. Well, you try to put a civilian population in the same situation in all ages, from two-year old girls to ninety-year old grandmas all taking a shower in a big, big old room. That didn't work very good. But in Pinedale, it was interesting because although they had these big single room showers, they didn't have flush toilets, so we had outhouses.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.