Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

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HS: Speaking of delivering the Japanese newspaper in Northwest Portland, the newspaper publisher, Mr. Oyama, I think I mentioned, he was picked up by the FBI on December the 8th, so he really had no time to do whatever with the printing presses and so forth. But according to the story that Al Oyama tells me was that the navy confiscated all that property, the printing presses and all the Japanese letters and whatever, and Al or the family, they don't know what happened to all that equipment. It's confiscated and gone. So when Mr. Oyama came back to Portland after the internment, then he started the newspaper again, but on a decidedly and definitely smaller scale, mimeographed it, so that was a pretty slow and painstaking process, but he decided to incorporate English news as well in as much as he was mimeographing it. So one of our, she's now deceased but Kimi Tambara, she was the English section editor for Mr. Oyama, so it turned out, it was a very informative deal for the Nisei now, couldn't read Japanese but we could read the English part of the paper, so that was a good deal.

And going back to the assembly center time, while, when we had to go sign up and family got a number whatever, I think they decided to evacuate us or made us report in alphabetical order because our family, Sakamoto, was amongst the last contingent so to speak. But while the early evacuees got into the assembly center and figured out the conditions there, they would call. They were able to go to a public phone and call out. So my parents would get telephone calls, could you bring this and could you bring that, when you come, when you report. So to the extent that they could, they did. So although the orders were that you could only bring what you can carry, we brought a little bit more than we could carry. But in order to do that, we didn't have a car, so we had to hire a little truck or van and driver to take us out to the assembly center. So we got out to the assembly center and see the fence, the barbed wire fence, and see the military police on guard. We dumped all the stuff out of the truck right at the main entrance there, and I saw my friends inside, so I decided to go in and talk to them. And so it's kind of a reunion, and then I decided, well, I better go out and help the folks bring the stuff in, but I couldn't get out. The military police, I was in jail. But anyway, that's a small story. But the military police were there. We were behind barbed wire, and at the total facility, the military police contingent had a military-type barracks there, and then the barbed wire fence went all around the Expo Center or the International Livestock property, about 11 acres or so or even more than that considering. One of the other discomforts while we were there is that just to the west of the livestock property was a, I don't know, rendering house or something like that, and when the wind blew from the west, it stunk almost as bad as inside the assembly center. But anyway, it's a discomfort that, another discomfort that was, you had to live with. And talking about food, there were a couple of instances of dysentery when everybody got diarrhea probably all about at the same time. And in as much as the lavatory facilities were limited, people ended up having to go on the outside of the facility but in the bushes and things like that. So for a while, few days or maybe a week or so after that, we had to be careful where we walked outside. You never know what you're going to run into, life's expectations.