Densho Digital Archive - Ted Hachiya Interview (denshovh-hted

<Begin Segment 11>

MP: Let's... okay. Let's leave that, let's leave Minidoka for just a minute, and we'll go and talk about, you were at U of O when the war was declared and then came this evacuation notice. Okay. Everybody... tell me about that and how that affected you as well?

TH: Well, the evacuation notice didn't come until April that year. The war, you know, it started in '41 and in 1942, I think. The evacuation notice in the month of April came, and my father was pretty ill with bleeding ulcers. God, I remember, I should remember the doctor's name. But when I came back to camp, he was eighty years old playing tennis out there at the Portland Adventist Hospital. It wasn't called Portland Adventist in those days. I think Portland Sanitarium was the name of the hospital. But he decided that he had, his ulcers were so bad that he had to cut the stomach out and become, my dad gave the decision to have it done. Why, I think he is, he had influential friends, acquaintances I should say. Knowing that he had to go in when the evacuation notice came, the operation was supposed to take place, and he asked somebody, I don't know who he asked, but he asked them to exempt me from evacuating to act as interpreter for him. They said, "You're granted," and I found out it was Joe Carson had a lot to do with it and a fellow by the name of Munson.

[Interruption]

MP: Okay. So Joe Carson was influential in backing up your dad's request to have you be interpreter.

TH: That's right. And I don't know exactly when I got it myself. It was in the mail. It was a pass that excluded me from the evacuation. And so I stayed home, stayed at the hotel, and I ran the hotel, you know. But every morning, I went to visit my dad and did whatever he needed, then I went to visit my mother and siblings out at the assembly center which was the Pacific Livestock.

MP: And how long were they at the assembly center?

TH: Three months. They evacuated in May, June, July, August. We had orders to go to Minidoka in September.

MP: Tell me about the assembly center, what that was like. What was, what did it look like, what --

TH: To begin with, it stunk. It was good for pigs and cows, but the place wasn't cleaned out real good, you know. In the summertime, it was horrible, and June or July, it smelled to high heaven. But, you know, if you stay in one place long enough, you get used to the smell. You can tolerate it.

MP: That's true.

TH: Yeah.

MP: Was it, had it, so it had been used for livestock?

TH: That's right. It was being used for livestock, and it's still being used for that. I don't think they have livestock there anymore. They had, they improved the building and the arenas.

MP: But after the Japanese were then sent out that they, it was used again for livestock?

TH: Uh-huh.

MP: Well, tell me about how they lived, how did your family live there?

TH: Well, the areas were all divided into family units with a, I think, plywood. It was plywood. I think it's four-foot wide, eight-foot long, so you had eight-foot ceilings, but it was all an open area. You can hear whatever your neighbors are talking about and whatever they're doing. My imagination went on. You're sleeping right next to somebody with just a plywood wall between you, you know.

MP: Was there, were there, but there, you were in, was everything inside one big building or --

TH: Yes. But there was Arena 1, 2, and 3, I guess, and then there was the Henry Thiele Building. There was a Henry Thiele Building in there that was the eating area.

MP: Was Henry Thiele supplying the food?

TH: He used, no. He ran the restaurant over there when they had the livestock shows, and it was still, you know, you could see when we visited in there, there was certainly a lot of Henry Thiele's name on the outside of that building.

MP: And what kind of food did they serve there?

TH: I don't know. I didn't eat there.

MP: Lot of rice?

TH: Well, they furnished rice, and I understand they had Vienna sausage most of the time. That's what they furnished.

MP: So what did you do to, to help kind of alleviate --

TH: My family, I took in food all the time. I even, I used to order a hundred hamburgers at a time for the kids in there.

MP: Where did you get those?

TH: Oh, it was called the Brown Jug, and it was shaped like a shoe right outside of the exposition ground, was only maybe three, four blocks from there on, well, it was [inaudible] off of Union Avenue, I think. But anyway, the man used to tell me, he asked me to give him notice because he had only two cooks. To put out a hundred hamburgers in one time is a lot of work, believe me. But he used to, at first, he used to give me individual packages of William's potato chips, but he said I had so much trouble. He started to give me five-pound or four-pound boxes. He gave me four of those darn things. They used to divide it all up. There was a fellow by the name of Tosh Shimizu. He's passed on now. But he was in charge of the young kids that were called the laborers, and they worked hard in there filling straw mattresses and cleaning up, you know, garbage and stuff like that, and he always felt sorry for them because they didn't get fed good, you know. So they had a special dining table, and he ordered hamburgers for them, but not every day, twice a week.

MP: And you were the one who got the hamburgers?

TH: Yeah. I got caught carrying booze in there, too.

MP: What did you do, carry some whiskey in there or --

TH: Well, Dr. Oyama, he's, or Yamada, he's passed on, but he's, he was an alcoholic. He was a good dentist, but he was an alcoholic, and he cried on my shoulders to bring him in a pint of whiskey, so I did. I'm naive, you know. I just had a bottle of whiskey in my pocket. I just took it in, and the guard saw me drag it out. He says, "Hey, hey, that's a no-no, you know. You can't take that kind of stuff in there. You can take food in there, but you can't take whiskey in there." So he confiscated it, but he says, "I'll give it back to you when you walk back out," and he did give it back.

MP: So the doctor never got it?

TH: No, he didn't get it. He, you know, he devised a way to bring alcohol in there. You were allowed to carry food in there particularly if you're on a diet. He canned whiskey, but the whiskey turned the cans black, and he was afraid to drink it. Inside, they went blind for alcohol.

MP: How, who did the canning of the whiskey?

TH: There's a fellow named Dick Saito and Dr. Oyama, they canned whiskey. They took in a case of canned whiskey, and they were drunk for quite a while.

MP: That must have been half poisonous.

TH: Well, I think Dick, he found out he could filter it through charcoal or something, and he drank all of it.

MP: This was all inside the camp?

TH: All inside the camp. It was a no-no. It was a, you know, contraband really because they told us how much luggage you could carry in and what foods you can carry in as a supplement to your own diet.