Densho Digital Archive - Ted Hachiya Interview (denshovh-hted

<Begin Segment 14>

MP: So your father passed, did he pass away, when did he pass away actually?

TH: 1943.

MP: In '43?

TH: Yeah.

MP: Did he die of those bleeding ulcers then or what?

TH: Well, no. He died from what they call a blocked, it's an organ that expels the yellow stuff, you know, out the urine. They cut out four-fifths of his stomach, and it didn't heal good because it got stuck to his liver. Gall bladder. It was a blocked gall bladder, but it turned jaundice, and the doctors in camp were a bunch of, I don't know. They weren't really MD's, I guess. I wanted to kill him when I came back because he made the wrong diagnosis, and he kept telling my dad that he had cancer, and I got, I borrowed a friend's car who owed Dad a lot of money and put him on this car and took him down to Salt Lake. I was already out, and there was a Richard, Richard or Richardson, they were brothers. They were both specialists in that field at the LDS Hospital, and they saw him, and they diagnosed it right away. He says, "Well, he's got a plugged gall bladder. We'll open him up tomorrow, 8 o'clock." But that night, his fever shot way up, and they said they couldn't do anything until that fever went down. They had a rubber liner around him, on his bed with ice cubes in there. I can see him just shaking away in this thing, but he wasn't conscious, but he passed away that way. I watched him die. I watched my mother go, I watch my son go, I watched my brother die. And I'm the only one in the family that witnessed all those things. My sisters weren't there. Of course, I wouldn't ask them. I felt somebody should be there, and I was always there.

MP: So you didn't feel that your dad got the right treatment? Was --

TH: It was the wrong diagnosis. They didn't treat it right, you know. They could have sent him outside the hospital, outside the camp to a specialist, but they didn't.

MP: So he was then, was he in the camp then at that time?

TH: Yes, he was in camp.

MP: And that was Minidoka?

TH: We evacuated from Portland from assembly center. The family was in assembly center. The day they were scheduled to go to Minidoka, I took my dad with them, and I went with them. We all went as a family back there. The day we get there, gee, it was bad. There was a dust storm, and men were crying to see this dust storm. You couldn't see ten feet ahead. It was so bad.

MP: Did you, did you all, how did you get there?

TH: Train, old wooden train that they resurrected someplace. They're made out of wood, and it was shuttered so you couldn't look outside or you couldn't see in.

MP: Was the whole assembly center evacuated at one time?

TH: No, I think in two or three bunches. They couldn't get them all at one time in the train. There was five or six thousand people.

MP: So they ran cycles of people up to Minidoka?

TH: Yeah.

MP: And so your dad went to Minidoka, I mean, your whole family then was in Minidoka, and you were there for like a month, and your dad then got sick again there?

TH: Yeah. Well, see, when we got to camp, Minidoka, it was September. I went out to work.

MP: Now, tell me how you could get out to work? Why were you able to?

TH: Well, the employers would come to the office seeking help. And if you signed up with him, if you reached an agreement, he was supposed to be responsible for your behavior, you know, and we signed up.