[Correct spelling of certain names, words and terms used in this interview have not been verified.]
<Begin Segment 5>
HH: Well, can you give a brief account of what happened from that point on until you arrived in Philadelphia? You went from Florin to some kind of assembly center?
GO: That's right. We were first taken to Fresno Assembly Center, I think it was May of 1942. No, yes, '42. And then stayed there until fall, October or November, and then we were transferred to so-called relocation camp, which was Jerome, Arkansas. So that was about four or five days' trip on the train.
HH: And from Jerome?
GO: Fresno to... yes. In the meantime, as the government started to encourage people to relocate, so many camps started to have empty rooms, and also government needed a place for German POWs. And they decided to turn our camp into a German POW camp. So we were scattered among the remaining nine camps at that time, and the family decided to go to Arizona, Gila, Arizona. So I moved with my sister's family.
HH: Many people in these camps had some kind of job. Did you have a job in Rohwer or in Gila?
GO: Oh, yes. Even at the assembly center in Fresno, anyone working for the state prior to evacuation was more or less encouraged or drafted to work in the office, so I was working in the mess and lodging office. And at Jerome, we had more choice, and I volunteered to look for a job to work out in the farm. Because in Jerome, the farming crew went outside of the camp to farm every day, and stayed out there all day and then they came back. And so I worked as a senior timekeeper for the agriculture crew, and they gave me a pickup truck to go to the farm, and in the farm they gave me a horse to visit about six or eight crews that I had. So that was an interesting job.
HH: Was it a fact that you were literate in Japanese and English?
GO: It helped, but that wasn't the prerequisite of that job. But I worked as an, I was in an accounting office, and that may have helped. So I was getting top pay, it was the same as doctors. [Laughs]
HH: And that's the other thing, large sum of nineteen dollars?
GO: Nineteen dollars a month, yes.
<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.