Densho Digital Archive - Henry Sakamoto Interview (denshovh-shenry

<Begin Segment 9>

JC: Well, we sort of backtracked there. So let's go forward, and it's in September of '42, and you're hearing word that you maybe are going to go to Minidoka, so talk about that.

HS: Well, the, I don't know if I could describe the anticipation. It's not a real anticipation. It's another drudgery, whatever. You have to go somewhere else that you don't know anything about. The other fact of the assembly center is that the internment went through two phases. First, it was the internment at the assembly centers, and they had to have the assembly centers because the ten permanent camps had not been constructed yet, so the Western Defense Command devised this method of getting the Japanese off of the West Coast. First, we'll put them in these assembly centers, and there were sixteen on the West Coast. Was there sixteen? Yeah, I think so, most of them in California except for Portland and the one up near Seattle, Puyallup, because the Japanese population of persons of Japanese ancestry was seventy, seventy-five percent in California, so they pay close attention to the, how to house all those people. So then anyway, they were constructing these permanent internment camps, ten of them. And typically, in Minidoka, they had to clear sagebrush, acres and acres of sagebrush, and so therefore, they cleared all that land, and so they left three to four to five inches of dust and built Minidoka on that kind of an area. So when we got there in September, it was, every time a breeze would blow, there'd be a terrific dust storm. The barracks in which we lived were not of very real solid construction, so the dust would leak in through doorways and windows that were not tight, so there was dust over everything in our living quarters. And if you got caught out there when the wind blew, walk through the dust storm, you'd age in fifteen minutes. Your hair would turn white like the dust. But anyway, it was an uncomfortable living situation.

We went by, from the assembly center to Minidoka, we went by train, and the train each, we were in coaches. The equipment was really old. It was like gaslight, but you know, I can't recall for sure. I think it was just an overnight. But we had to lower the shades so that we couldn't see out and people couldn't see in, and it was dark and dreary, and it was not a real pleasant ride. But we got there, and then we were picked up by drivers, these trucks, when we got to Minidoka, and it's a rough ride too within the camp. I don't remember a whole lot of detail about that particular segment, but the Minidoka internment camp was, if you want to call it, organized in a block system. A living unit was a block, and a block would have twelve barracks. A typical block would have twelve barracks, community mess hall, a laundry room, community laundry room, and community showers and toilets and a boiler room. And the mess hall and the laundry room would be in the middle, and there would be six barracks on each side. Each barrack would house six families. The living units on the ends were the small ones, maybe it would have two people. And then the next closer in would be the larger ones would house six or more people, and there were two middle units would house four or five people. And each living unit had a potbellied stove and one light hanging down from the ceiling, no partitions or anything like that, and of course, we had the army cots and no running water. So if you needed water, you had to go to the laundry room or to the bathroom to get water. And I figured out that from the farthest barrack, farthest point in the living units, to go to the bathroom to get the water or even to go to the bathroom is almost one city block, one Portland city block. And so there were no walkways at that time, no regular streets. There were gravel roads, and so you walk to your living unit walking through all this dust and dirt. But as time went on, if you could find the lumber, people would put together boards to walk on, planks to walk on. And then later on maybe in a year or so, gravel and rocks became available, so then we create walkways with the gravel and the rock. The living conditions in the internment camp were another instance of the lack of privacy. You had shower rooms without partitions and lavatories without stalls or commodes without stalls. But I suppose if you could get used to that lack of privacy by this time, one could get used to it, but that's something some people could never get used to in any case.

Then each living unit or block had a manager. He would see to it that administration was informed of whatever the needs were or means of communication from the total administration to the internees. We fondly called him the "blockhead," but he was one of the leaders of the community in pre-World War II in Portland anyway. But in our family situation, we kind of lucked out because we were in Block 32. I think totally within the Minidoka internment camp, there were forty-one or forty-two blocks. We were in Block 32. Half of our block was devoted to or committed to grade school, so half the block was a classroom situation for grade school kids. So we had a half a block population, and it was an advantage when it came to lining up for different things like lining up for meals or utilizing the laundry room. So population being half of a regular block, we got a break so that was good. And before you create an informal social organization within the block, get together for whatever, form a committee, should we throw a dance this weekend? Different blocks sponsored dances on Saturdays. If you wanted to do that, then create a committee and get to work and send the word out: "we're having a dance, come enjoy." But part of that was we would have the dance in the mess hall, and this mess hall, these mess halls also we had like picnic tables, so all those picnic tables would have to be moved and stacked if you want to have a social event, but we did.