Densho Digital Archive - George Iseri Interview (denshovh-igeorge

<Begin Segment 19>

AC: Where was your father interned?

GI: That's, I'll give you the other side of the story, too. He was interned at Fort Missoula. It was an army camp years ago, and I think they had Germans and Italians and Japanese in the camp. I went up there to see it, and my sister has been there since, and she wasn't able to identify the exact building that they were in, and I wasn't either. But I do want to tell you a little side story on that. About seven or eight years ago, I was contacted to and hired to, retained to take a group of Japanese from, one fellow was from Yamagata-ken and one was from Yamanashi-ken and the other, husband and wife and daughter were from Okinawa, to Missoula to see, to visit graves of their ancestors up there. And in Missoula, I found a very well kept cemetery with the Japanese section in it with some hundred and some graves in it. And you know, I made a speech there and I mentioned that there wasn't anybody else there but us and the minister from Seattle and one from here and a few officials from the State of Montana. And I thought it was really nice. It's well kept and all. And the fighter planes were, the training center is nearby, flying over the area. Trains going through there, you know. And what an appropriate place, I said, for, to lay to rest the Japanese people who worked on the railroads and probably the mines in the community. And while we were there... oh, by the way, Montana is the sister state of Kumamoto, Japan, Kumamoto, Japan, and so I met a delegation from Kumamoto at the Missoula airport as they come in to visit. And there's a Mansfield. Mansfield was the ambassador to Japan one time, and so they have quite an extensive program in Japanese, in Japanese language, and they have professors from Japan there and all. It's quite a, it's quite a, a good thing I think. It's a public relation between Japan and the United States, and they really treated us great. But since I was there, I told my wife, "Let's go to a couple of other places to visit cemeteries." Oh, by the way, most of those cemeteries were prewar. In Missoula, there were some after war but very few. So there's a hundred or more prewar cemetery, graves there. We went to Deer Lodge, and I didn't take time to count them very closely, but there's some current grave markers there, but there's also quite a bunch of them was there prewar. So if somebody would like to get some histories of prewar days, immigrants days, there's lots of history up there. I went to see in Ashley, Idaho. This fellow from Yamagata told me, he said, "You know, we got letters from his father and it came from Ashley, Montana." I think it was Ashley, Montana. And so a year or so later, I went up there to take a look at Ashley, and it was a very, very important roundhouse I would call it, junction for a train, and hot springs there. And so that was interesting that these people from Montana went up to places like that to enjoy the hot springs and things. You stop and think about those people, and by the way, there were where a lot of the people were from that came down into this area, Montana area, and Katie Hashitani's father-in-law and them probably worked out on the railroads and things. A bunch of them ended up here in a place called Emmett and filtered down in through here. And then a bunch of them came from the Idaho Falls area; some came from the Utah area.

AC: So after being in Tule Lake for a little while, you had the opportunity, the "loyalty oath" came down, the questions 27 and 28, and you answered "yes-yes" to get your pregnant wife and yourself out of the camp. Did your whole family go with you?

GI: To what?

AC: To leaving Tule Lake to come out here?

GI: No, no. We came out, me and two other brothers came out here first, and then we came out in February, March. Then family came out in June, I think, June of '40. Yeah, must have been about June of, no, must have, maybe a little earlier because they worked on the farm two years, so they must have been out there about March or April.

AC: And simply just to get out of the camp and to work?

GI: Yes.

AC: Sharecropping and --

GI: Yes. We felt very secure because my brother was here, see, and rightfully so because he, by the time we got here, he knew so many people and was involved with so many people that hired a lot of evacuees. They grew celery out here when we came here. Of course, they don't raise celery. They don't raise celery or lettuce here anymore because it's too far from the market. Now they could raise stuff right close to like lots of onions grow right in New York. Of course, it's a little different than celery and stuff. But celery is grown, Northwest and California along there. So the market couldn't compete with the freight rates and everything.