Densho Digital Archive
Oregon Nikkei Endowment Collection
Title: Amy Tsugawa Interview
Narrator: Amy Tsugawa
Interviewer: Dane Fujimoto
Location: Portland, Oregon
Date: September 3, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-tamy-01-0003

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AT: When they finally decided in 19, must have been '43 that we would be shipped to the mainland. By then, I guess there were ships that were available to ship all the families over to the mainland. Why, in January of 1943, we all gathered everything we had. Mom sold everything we had, took all the money that she could gather, put it in a bag, and that is what we carried with us to Honolulu. We stayed there in some kind of an internment camp there for a week and then were shipped on I think a ship called... oh, I can't remember the name of the ship, but we were shipped in January to the mainland. We were fortunate because I was ill at the time. The doctor gave us a little cabin. Everyone else had berths down below in the bowels of the ship. I can't remember any part of the trip because I was so young, but we did land in San Francisco and then were taken on trains to Jerome, Arkansas.

In Jerome, it was very bitterly cold, and we had snow there for the first time. It was a swamp when they decided to send us all there to have a camp there, and it was so cold, and it was muddy and miserable because the houses that they built for us there, the houses were built with wood that they had just cleared in that area, but it very green. So as it dried, it shrank. And so they had tarpaper up around it, but it didn't keep out the cold. We did have in each unit or each little apartment, there was a potbelly stove. My mother got, was allergic to, I think there my brother tells me that they found lots of ear fungus that was very popular with everyone in camp, and so everyone would go out to gather the ear fungus. And dad was ingenious enough to decide that rather than digging in the swamp, he could bring the logs home, make a little pond right under the house, and grow his own, which he did. He could grow his own miminawa which is what it was called at that time. And Mom then got poison oak or poison ivy. She got poison ivy, and it was so severe and she got so ill that they finally after about a year there in Jerome, they sent us to Arizona.

We went to Gila River, Arizona, and my brother was born there, my younger brother. I think it was much nicer there. The only problem with Gila, Arizona, was the sand storms. If we'd gone to the movies at night which they had out in the open, as soon as we could see that there was a sand storm coming, we'd have to run home as fast as we could because we knew it would be very painful to be out in it. Dad was a, he worked as a, everyone worked. Everyone had a job there. My dad was an ambulance driver and so, and he was very clever. He could build anything out of nothing. He built us a little cooling unit for our apartment because it was so hot, and then we got all the watermelon that we could eat because there were piles and piles of it in camp during the summer, and he would put it under the cooling unit and that cooling unit would cool the Watermelon, so we could eat it cold. He also built us, oh, when we were Jerome, we couldn't walk because it was so miserably cold and wet and muggy, and the soil was so swamp-like that he built us shoes to put under our shoes out of cardboard and nails. So he built, he nailed the nails through the cardboard and then strapped them to our feet so we could walk to school.

But I can't remember much more about Arizona. Dad didn't stay there long because he was asked to go to Boulder, Colorado, to instruct the army in the Japanese language to speak and to translate and to write and read. He stayed there for a while, then he was sent, he got, I think he got his normal school degree so he could teach and then he went, we went to Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where we lived for, oh, until the war was over. But we were able to leave camp because we now had a home, and we had a job outside of camp, and he taught there. He taught at the school until the war was over.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.