<Begin Segment 18>

HY: This is, when I was there and I signed up after a week or so not doing anything, I signed up to be a camp order, hospital orderly. Now, when I say hospital, I don't mean hospital like Portland Adventist Hospital. I mean like a hospital that's built in an infirmary, barracks, and the barracks was about 120 feet long and 20 feet wide, so that was our infirmary, and so I signed up to do to be an orderly. Now you would ask what does an orderly do in a place like that. Well, I'll tell you when I think about that, I don't think I did very much because there wasn't nothing, anything to do. But one of the jobs I had there was delivering milk for the new mothers and babies because we had no hospital that really, no central place to prepare formula for the babies, so it was prepared by the nurse's aides, the young Nisei girls about my age preparing the formula and so on. But one of my jobs was to help deliver the milk at certain stations throughout the camp. And so the driver and a person who was handling the bottles and the checker checking on would drive around these stations. And we'd stop, and we had a sign on our jeep, and the women who had their babies would come out and they'd say, "Well, my name is Nomura. I need one bottle." And the other one would say, "My name is Watanabe. I need two bottles. I have two babies." So they said it in Japanese though because in those days, almost all the mothers were Issei, and most Issei women spoke very poor English. The Nisei mothers were just beginning to have a family. So if they had any, it will be only one or, just very few of them, very few. So of necessity, this crew delivering the milk had to speak Japanese because the mother would say, "Watashi wa Watanabe desu, ichi." So I'd say, I'd look at this, and of course, we had the list at each station, so I says, "Nanchu namae desu ka." Well, nanchu namae desu ka is very terrible Japanese. It means to me, "What is your name please?" Well, that's Okayama-ben. Ben is an accent, see, and that's what I grew up with. I grew up knowing Okayama-ben thinking I was speaking standard Japanese when it wasn't standard Japanese at all. It was colloquial, and it was slang. They can understand me, see, even Tim can understand me, but he knows that it's bad Japanese. I didn't know that, so I thought I speaking hey, great Japanese. Nanchu namae desu ka. Then they say, "Watanabe." They say, "Oh." So after I deliver, did my work and we drove off next station, one of the girls turned around and say, "What did you say? What did you ask those ladies?" "Nanchu namae desu ka, what's your name?" "That's not the way you say that. You supposed to say, "Onamae wa nan desu ka.'" That's the proper way, formal way to say, "What is your name please?" but I didn't know that. You know, I was seventeen, and I didn't know that I was not speaking proper Japanese. And it's all the more surprising because my mother was a junior college graduate. She was a teacher. But at home, I didn't know. My uncle, my aunt, my father spoke Okayama dialect. They didn't speak standard Japanese. Never, we did go to Japanese school and we heard standard Japanese there, but I didn't make the connection that there was a difference. So up until then, I thought hey, I know Japanese. Yeah, I speak it good, but it was colloquial and dialect Japanese.

The other thing in Pinedale, these are personal anecdotes, as I say. I was working as an orderly. I don't know, maybe I got fired from that job because of my Japanese difficulty. But anyway, my next job was a "latrine inspector," quote. Remember, I told you that the latrines were, they were two holers. Women had a two holer, separate from the men's two holer, but they were two holers. And my job was to inspect these things, make sure the flies weren't getting in there and the doors were screened, and also the dump, I think it must have been quick lime. It was a white powder. It was a bucket and a scoop. You'd go in there, lift up the lid, and dump it out, label a cup full of this white powder and go around there. Well, I had to do that to the women's room too, but, so I said, gee. In the beginning, I said, "God that's quite a quandary. I can't sit and wait and see if it's empty." So eventually, I go up there and rap on it, "Dare ka haite imasu ka? Is there someone in there? And about half the time, nobody would answer. "Dare ka haite imasu ka?" No answer. So I'd opened the door [screams]. Some woman would sitting on the pot, and oh, my god. You know, this is like the Keystone Cops, but it actually happened. Oh, my god. Why don't these dumb women say something? It's a man's voice asking if somebody's in there, but they didn't. But even worse than that on the pot was the women's shower because there'd be several of them in the shower. My job in the shower, in those days, they had these foot baths and they had, I don't know, chlorine or something, water. And before you go into the shower, you're supposed to step in the foot bath or chlorine water to, fungus on your toes or something, then you go in the shower. Then when you get out, you reverse the process. Well, my job was to change the chlorine water in there. But in order to do that, I had to get in the shower room, yeah. Go there, "Dare ka oremasu ka? Dare ka haite imasu ka?" No answer. Of course the same, [screams]. That was so funny. [Laughs] I think I got fired from that job too. But that was my experience.

And then, I was there only a short time, and the living conditions were kind of primitive. My older brother Chop, he was pretty active. He was nine years older than me, so he was twenty-six and married, having his first baby already, so he was very active in the Nikkei community. And in those days, they wanted to let the Niseis run things because the Niseis themselves were kind of arrogant, and they said, well it's the Nisei, Issei, our parents' generation got the short end because they didn't speak English, and they didn't become American citizens. Although they couldn't, but they kind of blamed it on the parents because they didn't know any better, and they were country bumpkins. So the Niseis decided probably, mainly unilaterally but with support, that they were going to take over the administrative functions. So my brother became a leader in the camp, and he'd be one of the big shot in the camp administration. But remember, this camp administration had another layer which were the white administrators, and they are the ones that call the shot. So, but anyway, my brother would frequently be an emcee at these talent shows which is held on a big outdoor stage. And you know, in the summertime, when the sun goes down and temperature cools, it was really nice. The stars would come out. There were brilliant stars in the sky. It's black on the south side because we're, there's no light pollution in this, because we're out in the middle of nowhere, and so they'd have the stage lights and so on. They'd have the little Nisei girls get out and sing "Shinano Yoru," "Shanghai Hanauri Musume," lots of Japanese songs. No marshal there. I don't remember hearing a "Aikoku Koshin Kyoku" which is a military naval air, very good song. But, then they'd have tap dancing. Then they'd have other girls sing "Sleepy Lagoon" or "Tangerine." I could still remember those songs. I remember these. You know, this is almost seventy years. This is sixty years ago, and I remember those things, "Tangerine." I can still remember the words. I never can sing it, but I know the words to it. Hey, those are the things I remember.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.