<Begin Segment 23>

TI: Just to finish up with Minidoka, is there any other memories that you have of Minidoka that you wanted to share?

KO: Well, the positive side of the whole thing, I kind of... I used the Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's... she had a quote in her book --

TI: Farewell to Manzanar?

KO: -- Farewell to Manzanar, where she says we set aside or contained our anger and went about to establish some kind of normalcy in our life. I think that describes my experience pretty well. Because I learned, I didn't contain my anger... well, I contained my anger. I didn't do anything foolish, but there was a lot of good things about what we did with ourselves. One of them, of course, was at least, even if you didn't like school, you still went. Because I had graduated with one quarter hour credit for my graduation.

TI: Say that again? You graduated with one...

KO: One-fourth hour.

TI: One-fourth hour? So I don't quite still understand.

KO: I think that time was, you were required to have thirty-two credits to graduate. If you had less than thirty-two credits, you've got to repeat something. I had thirty-two and one-fourth hour credits.

TI: Oh, I see. So you did the minimum, essentially. I get it.

KO: [Laughs] But that qualified me to go to college.

TI: And after you graduated from Hunt High, I think you told me that you then moved out of Minidoka, so let's talk about that. So you finished high school, what did you then do?

KO: I had an adult cousin, a fellow who calls himself a cousin of mine. I didn't really know the relationship, but I think one of my father's sister, whose sisters were older than he, married a fellow named Shimizu in Japan. But anyhow, there was a fellow named Shimizu in camp who was fifteen or twenty years older than I was, maybe even older. And he was cooking at the Twin Falls labor camp after the war. So I left camp in June, and he promised me a job at the Twin Falls labor camp kitchen. So I went there to work in the kitchen to wait for my draft board to call.

TI: Okay. So it was kind of like he had this job in Twin Falls that you could go to. And how did the people in Twin Falls treat Japanese Americans?

KO: Well, there were some parts of Twin Falls you just didn't go to. I remember going to a restaurant in Twin Falls waiting for a cup of coffee, and the waitress would go past you, past you, pass you again, like you weren't there. I never did get waited, so I got up and left. And then there were a few places, by word of mouth, they say you could go there and have, be served, or you could go there and be served, but don't go there because they don't want you there.

TI: So you had to kind of figure or find out and talk with people. Were there any other incidences like that Twin Falls restaurant where you knew that you weren't wanted?

KO: That was the only time I experienced that.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.