<Begin Segment 15>

VO: I remember... Minidoka. We wanted to go back to, you were in Minidoka how long and for what, at what age?

YM: I was in Minidoka for one year almost to the date. I was nine years old and I left when I was ten.

VO: And you said you learned to swim there.

YM: Kind of.

VO: What was that story?

YM: I started in the irrigation pond and moved up to the canal, and then we went to the swimming hole.

VO: But you took to swimming easily?

YM: I guess I did. But when I started high school, I started to swim competitively. It was kind of a late age to start, but I did. And I swam for Lincoln and then I swam for University of Oregon. And then I also swam in the army.

VO: And it all started in the irrigation pond at Minidoka?

YM: Yeah. [Laughs] They had a pool in Texas, too. It wasn't a pool, it was a reservoir, water reservoir for irrigation. And the inmates dug it, and they put concrete on it and they used it for irrigation. And they also let us go swimming in it, so we swam in there.

VO: And "inmates," is that how you referred to yourselves when you were there at the time?

YM: No, I just call that because everybody else says they were inmate. I guess we were inmates, because we were behind barbed wire.

VO: Did it feel like that at the time?

YM: That place was really a jail.

VO: Crystal City?

YM: Yeah. It was nothing like Minidoka. I mean, they had fences. They were twelve feet high and guard towers every so often, and they had a horse patrol that went around the perimeter and through the camp, and they looked like Texas rangers, they all rode horses and wore the ten gallon hats and had a pistol in their... it was spotlights all night long, and that was really a camp. Nobody escaped, though. They had it too good in there, I guess. [Laughs]

VO: Do you remember any impressions that that made, to see the patrols with horses and guns?

YM: No, just figured that we were there to stay.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright (c) 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.