<Begin Segment 8>

VO: So then your family is reunited at Ellis Island, and then what happened next?

YM: From Ellis Island we went to Crystal City, Texas. They put us on the ferry in the morning, they took us to Grand Central Station, and we're walking down inside the Grand Central Station behind the armed guards. It's early in the morning, and we go down the corridor and downstairs, and they put us on this car, railroad car, separate from the rest of the customers. And there was an armed guard in both sides of the car, and we're off to Texas. And along the way, the air conditioner broke down. This is mid-September, and we have no change of clothes, and we're going down and we opened the window, all the soot comes in the window, and that's quite an interesting ride. It took about a week, I think, to get to San Antonio. Then from San Antonio, they bussed us to Crystal City. It was known as the spinach capital of the world. They have a statue of Popeye right in the center of the town, and that's the only, I think that's the only time we saw that, 'cause that's the only time I was outside the camp. But we got to the camp, and it's just like a refugee. They tell us to take a shower, and they gave us new clothes and they feed us and then assign us quarters.

VO: So describe what the living was like in Crystal City.

YM: Texas was quite different than Minidoka. It was a agricultural migrant camp, so they had cabins all set up. And what they did was build a few more buildings and a hospital and administration building, schools, and then they put a fence around 150 acres. So it was very small, and a number of people, and the size of the camp. One interesting this is that not only were there Japanese from the mainland, but we had Japanese from Hawaii and from Peru, and I don't know if many people know that the Peruvians were used as hostages, and they were brought to the United States, and they paid Peru money. I read a book called The Silver Thread, and describes all that. But the interesting thing is that we had Italians and Germans there, and there was a very prominent German there, I think his name was (Fritz Julius) Kuhn, and he was the head of the Nazi party of America. He eventually got deported. But they used to have torch parades and everything in there. But the only thing that the camp, I guess, commandant, said, "Don't raise the flag." So it was pretty much... the Japanese and the Germans, they didn't intermingle at all. We had separate commissaries and everything, no fence or anything in between. But they issued plastic money for buying food at the commissary, and my mother would go every day to buy food for the family. And they would deliver ice every day for the ice box, and they would deliver milk every day.

VO: So you had your own cabin, your family?

YM: We had a cabin that we shared with three other families. But there wasn't a big cabin, but there was a couple and another family with one son, and our family we had four. And there was a small toilet in the center of the cabin, and the showers we had to take out in a separate building. And the heating and the cooking was done by kerosene. So my job was to go get the kerosene when we needed it. Just like in Idaho I had to go get the coal to stoke the fire.

VO: So your mother was able to cook for your family there?

YM: Right.

VO: So it was quite different.

YM: It was quite different because I think it must have been under the Geneva Convention rules for prisoners of war. And they had to serve so much protein, so much carbos, and the food there was quite different besides the fact that my mother was cooking for us.

VO: So you think it was better than at Minidoka?

YM: Oh, it was much better. We had rice and we had shoyu and miso and everything that the Japanese would eat.

VO: And did your father, what did he do during the daytime?

YM: He had, everybody there had to work. And, of course, his job, he managed the wholesale commissary for the canteen, not the commissary. So he used to do the buying for the store, so he was in his element.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright (c) 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.