<Begin Segment 6>

AC: How was it when you moved to Minidoka?

KT: Well, that was, everything was gone. There was no future, said, "What am I gonna do?" That was my thinking, 'cause I'm only, I was in the twenties, you know, twenty-two, -three, -four year old then. And god, you got to start, and here you got nothing. I had a suitcase come out here.

AC: Can you describe what it was like to live in Minidoka?

KT: And no money. Nobody had any money those days. Pardon?

AC: How was it like to live in Minidoka?

KT: Oh, I went back in the winter. In the summer we would come out to work around this area, so that's how I got acquainted, and I enjoyed the people working for. They were very, very, they were very helpful. All the ones I worked for were real good people. They're just, it seemed that I had no problem of getting into. My lawyer was very good, I had a lawyer here, took care of my legal work, and he was a Basque, you know, he was very, very good. So I had no problem there. And so I had a very good relationship here in Ontario all the way through. Only thing that I do, if I get a ticket, well then I have to pay the ticket. [Laughs] That's the thing. But other than that, it was all right.

AC: Do you remember, was there a garden or any kind of vegetables growing in Minidoka?

KT: Well, yeah. All these... not all of 'em, but this camp that we were in Minidoka, they had quite a garden. My dad worked in the garden, see, lot of the Japanese, raising the vegetables there like Tule Lake, they did a lot of that, too, you have to talk to anyone. And they raised a lot of stuff, so they shipped to other camps. There was ten camps.

AC: Was there also a Japanese garden in Minidoka?

KT: Well, they were, they raised daikon, the Japanese, all that Japanese... you mean flower garden?

AC: Flower garden.

KT: Gosh, I don't remember that. Because in the spring, we'd all go out to, stay out here all summer, and then in the fall, the sugar beet was one of the last crops, so gosh, that's in October, work in the snow, pick popcorn out there with horses, cobs, in the snow, this is over around Nampa district. So we stayed 'til the season closed, then went back to camp. And then a couple, three months, you'd come back out again in the early spring.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.