<Begin Segment 11>

BH: Now here you were with all these Japanese American families in camp, and you had a brother who was fighting in the war. What were the feelings of the Isseis, your parents' generation? What were they thinking?

DH: My dad figured, he was proud of all the, my brothers in the service and so on. He had these flags out with the stars, said, "I got so many sons in the service," and so on. He managed pretty well. My mom did okay because my dad kept her in line, too.

BH: Were there families that you knew of who lost sons in the war?

DH: Later, yes. Not few, in the early part. Like my good friend, I wrote him a letter, and he came to see me before he left when he was in camp, and I was ready to go to work out in the railroad, so I wrote him a letter, and it never got to him. It came back to me. I still have it.

BH: That's how you knew he had lost his life?

DH: I never opened it. I just don't know what I wrote in it.

BH: So how were families notified in camp?

DH: They had military people come in and notify them.

BH: I heard something about stars in windows?

DH: Yeah. The stars represented how many sons you have in the service.

BH: So did you ever think about why you and all those other Japanese Americans were in camp?

DH: No, I figured that they were there because of the war. And I know I can't do anything myself to fight it, so I went along with it. But the first chance I had, every harvest, I was out doing different job, different farm, different places. I even worked on the big ranch where they had huge horses. And I had to harness, just like Wells Fargo, the team of horses, I had to harness them all up. I remembered how to do this because we had a harness with the horse. So I had to figure out which one goes where, and this one goes... four horses, and I drove this wagon on top of this, and we were hauling the hay back in the barn. Before that, I had used a team of horses to cut the hay, rake the hay, all with horses, and farm didn't have the tractor. They were still in horse stage. So I did that. We worked on different farms, different times, we worked on the orchard picking peaches, doing sugar beet harvest, driving trucks. So I had different experience.

BH: And you weren't in camp the entire time, you were allowed to go out, but you always had to return.

DH: During the winter I returned and found a job doing something in camp. But we always had, we had dances on Saturday. So they, Harry Inukai was there, and he had all the equipment. So every Saturday we just posted our own things, and all the people from different blocks came over.

BH: So what did Harry have? Music?

DH: Yeah, he had records and music.

BH: Okay.

DH: And big speakers, boxes, and so on.

BH: Why do you think it was that people didn't talk about why they were in camp?

DH: Well, none of us said too much about it. We knew we were there. We knew we can't do anything about it, do bad things like go steal gasoline and stuff like that for our cars. Other than that, we were, had fun because we were all same age group, all young Nisei guys. We did our things and just played poker and everything like that.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.