<Begin Segment 9>

AC: And after three months in the "assembly center," put you in these troop carriers.

IK: Troop trains.

AC: Troop trains. What was that like?

IK: Hot, sweaty, and it was a lot of soot around the trains, too. And so it was a terrible ride.

AC: Did you have seats?

IK: Oh, yeah. We had seats and everything, but you had to stay in that one car. You couldn't move from that car.

AC: You said you and your father were captains of the car.

IK: Well, my dad was supposed to be the captain and I was his lieutenant. [Laughs]

AC: How did you get the job?

IK: I don't know. I really don't know. They just told me what we were, and so just to watch over the group was all we were supposed to do.

AC: Were there any other guards on the train?

IK: Oh, yeah. They'd come through once in a while, yeah. But they were stationed all along the train.

AC: And so on this train, can you describe the car to me? I mean, how many people fit in this car?

IK: Well, it's... if you've never seen an old car, one of those troop trains, it's just a car. I don't know how to explain it, it's just got seats in it. It'll probably hold thirty or forty people in there. But our car wasn't full. We only had, I think we only had about twenty people in there.

AC: Could you open the windows?

IK: Oh, yeah, we would open the windows and look out. But we couldn't get off, we never got off until we got to Parker, Arizona.

AC: So you could open the windows, open the shades, but it was just really hot in this car because it was in the summer, middle of summer?

IK: Yeah, in July. Then it was hot when we got there, too.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.