<Begin Segment 6>

HH: Okay, then you eventually moved out of Poston.

AI: Yeah. Then, I guess my father said that people from Seabrook came to the camp and offered work and housing for the families, whoever went to work for Seabrook Farms. So with the government subsidy, and the fact that we could have employment to raise the family, so my father probably asked my grandfather if it was a good move to move east. And my grandfather being a pretty educated guy, probably recommended that we take the move. So we came to Seabrook in late October 1944.

HH: I'm guessing you were about fourth grade then?

AI: I was in fifth grade, started fifth grade.

HH: So you went through the Seabrook system.

AI: So okay, you want me to go through the Seabrook system? Okay. Yeah, it was quite a, at the time, we wanted to, as a family, we wanted to go back to California. But I guess my dad said, "No, we're going to New Jersey." And so we got on the train and came to New Jersey. Well, my father had this 1941 Buick, which was driven to the camps from Salinas by Manuel, which was a Filipino worker who farmed my grandmother's farm, and drove it to Poston during the middle of the war. But because we couldn't drive it, it sat in the garage right there in Poston. And then when we were allowed to leave, my father, Mit, his brother, and Harry Iwashige, my cousin, drove the Buick all the way across the United States while we took the train, so the rest of the family took the train. So when we arrived in Seabrook in late October 1944, it was only like two days later, my father and Harry came and Mit came in with the car. Said, wow, they drove that whole two thousand five hundred miles almost as fast as us taking the train. So we were surprised at that. And they said it was a pretty hectic drive because there was a lot of back roads. They didn't have any superhighways then.

HH: And gas rationing, too.

AI: And gas rationing, exactly. So when we got to Seabrook, the car kind of sat in the parking lot there for a long, long time without being driven. And then of course, because we were the only ones that had a car, a lot of our younger neighbors came over and asked my father whether they could drive the car. And he said yes to some and no to others. But we were rich in the sense that we had an automobile whereas ninety percent of the people in Seabrook didn't have an automobile. So that made my father feel good.

HH: What do you remember as some of the notable features of living in Seabrook?

AI: Well, coming to Seabrook was almost like camp in a way. Although we had an apartment which had an indoor toilet and shower facilities, although I didn't realize at the time that the bedrooms were so small. So all of us, the six of us, fit into this three-bedroom apartment. And then we had a fourth with my youngest daughter, I mean, sister. So there were seven of us in there. So when we arrived, gee, just two doors down the road, Miko was there, and they were, I guess, Mr. Sasaki must have gone back to wherever their camp was and brought the kids back. Because I think they started school a little after us, and so they lived three houses, three apartments down in the same building. And yeah, when we... getting back, we went to Seabrook school. And I remember walking into the fifth grade class and seeing the Japanese there. It was probably eighty-five percent Caucasian, fifteen percent Asians, and a couple of Blacks. And so it was kind of a traumatic experience for me walking into that classroom. Mrs. Meyers was the fifth grade teacher, and I could not, I was not a very good reader. And I still remember because I was not a good reader, she started on the right-hand side, she had all the best, smartest students down the class, I guess ten rows down to the dumbest students. So I was about three quarters of the way down towards the dumber class, because my reading was very poor. And I wish my mother, even though she was college educated, but she didn't teach me out to read. So again, I was a real brat, really. I was really a spoiled kid. I got into a few fights in Seabrook, not many, where you just face each other with your fists and you kind of stare at each other but very few swinging. [Laughs] And then so it was like camp, really, because there was a lot of guys your age. So we had gangs, we developed gangs. And gangs were developed, we were the Hornets. There were about ten of us, and there was the Blue Devils, another group of ten, there was the El Lobos and the, there were quite a few others. And we formed basketball teams, football teams from these groups of ten or eleven. And so we played each other all these sports, and these were all against Japanese Americans. So we were kind of in our own ghetto here. I call it a ghetto because looking, it was really cramped. But we were happy with where we lived.

HH: Lot of people had nicknames in those places. You have a nickname?

AI: No. Now and then they'd call me "Punjab" because my name is Bunji. So in a sense I got, somebody called me Punjab, and that stuck with me for a little while, but not a lot. And so we had these basketball teams and yeah, we had a lot of nice basketball teams, softball teams, games, and football games. Some of the football games got real nasty. Because you didn't have any equipment, no shoulder pads, and you start tackling each other. And then you're tackling each other on concreate sidewalks because the football field went across sidewalks. So we had some wicked wounds. But yeah, I thought that experience in Seabrook was, as a kid growing up was really, it gave us a lot of teamwork, a feeling of a family and togetherness. Because once we got our group of ten guys together, we did everything together. So we went swimming together, rode the bicycles together. And when we got to high school, we'd kind of, in a way, when we got to high school, we kind of went funny, at least our group did. We tried to assimilate into the white culture. And so the friends that we developed during the grammar school years kind of broke up a little bit. But after high school, then we got together again.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.