Densho Digital Archive - Isao Kameshige Interview (denshovh-kisao

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AC: This is an interview with Isao Kameshige, eighty-year-old Niseiman. It's taking place in Ontario, Oregon, on December 3, 2004. The interviewer is Alton W. Chung of the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center Oral History Project 2004. So thank you so very much for agreeing to go and speak with us today.

IK: Quite all right.

AC: And I'd just like to go ahead and start off very simply. Where were you born and when were you born?

IK: Okay. I'm not quite eighty yet. [Laughs] Another three, four months and I'll be eighty, but I like to say I'm eighty. It sounds good. But I was born in Galt, California, and when I was still an infant we moved to Campbell, California, that's right next to San Jose. And we lived there for about four years, and then from there we moved Coyote, and that's about another fifteen miles out of San Jose. We were farmers basically, farmers, farming all that time. We stayed in Coyote for about four years, and then from there we moved to Hollister, California. That's where I went through grammar school, I went through high school and graduated from high school there in 1942. And we weren't quite through with that school year, but they graduated us early. And then, of course, that's when the war broke out, in '41, and so in '42, May, we were told to go to camp. And so we were incarcerated at the Salinas Assembly Center. And it was a fairgrounds, and we had to make our living quarters in the stalls, the horse stalls that they had at the fairgrounds. And we had, they gave us cots, and we made, we had to make our own mattresses with straw. And then we stayed there for about three months. I was a waiter at one of the kitchens there.

One of the things that affected me most at that camp was that some of our friends that we used to play high school basketball and football came to visit us and they wouldn't let 'em in. And we couldn't go out, naturally, and we had to talk through the fence and we had to say goodbye by just touching fingers across the fence, and that kind of didn't seem right. But, of course, we were in camp, so there was nothing much we can do about anything.

And then from Salinas Assembly Center, we were transferred over to Poston, Arizona. It's camp number one, there was three camps over there and we were in camp number one, and they shipped us in a troop train. And my dad and I were captains of our car, and we were supposed to watch so that nobody would try to jump out of the cars or cause any problems, and that's how we traveled. And we got into Parker, Arizona, and it must have been about 115 degrees, because it was really warm. And we got into camp, they took us in buses into the camp, and all there was was tarpapered barracks there. And they gave us a room, one room for four of us: me, my dad and mom, and my sister and I. And there's four of us in this one room, and what we had to do was use blankets to have any privacy. And then the floors were open, and, in fact, we had a sandstorm a few days later, and sand was all over inside the room. But we kind of got used to it and cleaned up as much as we could, and we put stuff on the floor so the wind wouldn't come in anymore.

And everything was, like the bathrooms and everything were communities, just like our kitchen was, and that's where I worked, was in the kitchen of the assembly there. I was the waiter, I worked as a waiter, and then I went into cooking and got paid sixteen dollars for being a waiter, and we got paid nineteen dollars for being a cook, so I graduated, I guess. [Laughs]

The second year... I did that for a year, and then on the second year, I got a job driving an Adams 511 road grader, and I used to drive that along the camp roads from Parker to Poston and in the camp itself. We played a lot of basketball, we made our own courts. They requisitioned some telephone poles, and we made four posted backboards, and put a backboard on those four posts. Every block, we used to call those blocks, but there's about, oh, I'd say a dozen barracks in each block, and every block nearly had a basketball court on it. And we made up our own teams, and, in fact, we even played Parker High School, and they were pretty rough. [Laughs] But we had our own basketball games, and that's how we passed our time.

And then three summers I went to work outside on a work crew. Two years I went to Nebraska, a place called Cozad, Nebraska. I worked for a fellow, a rancher named Noal Coward, and he had a sheep ranch plus vegetable crops, not vegetable crops but corn, sugar beets and potatoes. And we worked in those fields, and I worked driving a team of horses for him for hauling manure, sheep manure, so that they dehydrated it and sold that as dehydrated sheep manure, I guess, for gardens and people that wanted it. And one year I went to work for Frank Wada over there in Pingree, Idaho, putting potatoes away in the cellar. And that's about all we ever did in camp.