Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 21>

MH: Did you walk around camp very much? Did you see things, you know?

GN: We actually walked around quite a bit. Within Block 34, only two people had bicycles, and one of the people later on would never let the children use his bicycle. Mr. Kondo though was very generous, so we used to butter up to him and always ask him about once a week whether we could ride his bicycle. However, there were about five or six of us, and we could never all ride the bicycle, so it'd be just two at a time riding a block or two, longest trip we would make would be up to the canteen to buy a snack. So in actuality, most of the places we went to, we walked there. The longest walks I would take was when my mother got ill and was hospitalized at the Minidoka hospital, and we had that long walk from Block 34 clear down to, I can't remember where it was but Block 5 or 6 where the hospital was. That was quite a long walk. So we went, we saw the high school, we saw gardens, we saw the water tower, canteen, movie houses. And later on, they had a lot of exhibits as the years went by. They had sewing contests, greasewood contests, painting contests, quite a few exhibits in different blocks, but we would always walk to those exhibits.

MH: What did you see in one of the windows of the barracks?

GN: Each compartment was sparsely furnished. There was really no difference from one to the other for the first couple of years. The only thing that really grabbed me were the gold stars representing soldiers that died in action. My father did an unusual thing with our compartment. Being quite creative, we were one of the first apartments to ever have a basement. Now, don't get me wrong here. When I say basement, I mean he sawed a hole in the floor, built himself a ladder with two-by-fours, dug a hole down there, and we had room to store different things. So if we were able to buy maybe a canned something up at the canteen or maybe there was something else that we wanted to keep down there, he would build those shelves, stairwell, some food, not perishable, that we'd keep in the basement. To my knowledge, we had one of the only apartments or compartments with a basement in the entire Minidoka internment camp. So everyone tried to be a bit creative, a bit original, get a piece of cloth and you go to sewing school and you make yourself a little curtain, and paintings would be hung on the wall, but nothing really drastic because you could not do anything structurally. So just a few decorative hangings, a different curtain or two, the porch, the wallpaper, the tarpaper, the Franklin stove, the bin for the coal, all of that remained pretty well stable with all the compartments, uniformly, very, very similar.