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5-Interactions with Soldiers

What were interactions like with the American soldiers?

Our interactions, okay. Some really funny things happened in camp. One of which was that the Issei—the old generation—got very upset because the girls began to flirt with the American soldiers who were on the watchtowers with their guns. They got to talking with each other. I think it's almost inevitable when you have young people that they are going to reach out and talk to each other. The Issei got very upset—the old people. They had a plan and their plan was to grow—they knew that the Japanese girls are very careful about where they walk because—we had an incident in camp where somebody brought seeds and they began to grow the seeds. Everyone was trying to do something to make life a little bit better. They began to grow seeds. They put up fence, a little wire string around the place and nobody would step on it. Everything was very careful every morning to make sure that nobody stepped in the area where the seeds were being planted. So the Issei came up with the idea that they were going to plant flowers all around the edges, and told everybody, "You can't go near here because we got this planted!" So, the girls were way back there and you really couldn't talk to the soldiers too well, and so that kind of took care of that program. We said "The Issei were pretty smart!" They knew how to deal with by using this kind of method. It's kind of interesting to see how people dealt with problems inside the camp without a real confrontation within the families. But there were confrontations within the families. I could remember some that were very sad.

Can you give us an example of those confrontations?

I guess the saddest part was I think I talked a little bit about questions twenty-seven and twenty-eight, which really split families. What was sad was for me to go over to the families and listen to the young kids—who must have been twelve, fourteen, sixteen year old kids—crying and saying, "I don't want to go to Japan, I don't want to go to Japan". The parents are saying "There is no future for you here, we're going to go to Japan". The kids had no say, so they had to go where the parents went. They did go to—some of them had go to Japan. There were others where parents did listen to what the kids said. But they couldn't leave the kid over there in America while they went back to Japan. They decided to stay. That was some of the sad parts, is when I worked with families along with what they were going to do as a result of the questionnaire. Other kinds had to do with, "My son is always out", and I thought my mother could have that same complaint! So we talked about camp life and what it was like for people to be in camp and how difficult it was to keep a family together in the camp.

I always brought in my example of our family and how we are all now eating together with other people " Is that happening to you?" and they would say " Yes, and we don't want that." Well when they had little kids they did bring the food back and they would eat. We had some of the people bring the food back and eat in the rooms and all, so that there would be some semblance of a family life and they wanted very much to keep it. Well the children are little so they obey the parents and they went in. It’s, as they grew older that it was very difficult to keep the families together. Families did split apart. So those were the kinds of things that—complaints about girls who went to dances and things like that. So we had to explain again that this was a very natural for girls to go to dances and it was a way and outlet for them. Parents were really fairly open. Much more open than they had been if were if living in San Francisco cause they realized the problems in camp were so hard people had to learn how to make life a little bit more comfortable for themselves.

Can you explain your daily life in Topaz?

Very similar to the life in Santa Anita. What's different was that my brothers had these friends who were tall and they were fourteen and sixteen year old kids. My other brother was seventeen and they had tall friends and we had these low windows in our barracks and we didn't have any curtains on them for some reason—I don't know why we didn't have curtains. They would come every morning and yell "Tomiyo, Harry, it's time to go for breakfast!" My brothers were under the covers like this they didn't want to wake up, and so they would yell and knock on the door and we're trying to get dressed. How could you get dressed when the boys have their heads in the window peeking at you? There was no place to hide. So we'd yell at them "Go away he'll—they'll get up! They'll get up!" I could remember the mornings like that. Then we'd have breakfast.

The breakfast—the food in camp was very different. I do remember some of the food in camp. I think I mentioned that they had tofu, that the Japanese put together a tofu—I don't know factory I don't know what you call it, but they made the tofu. After we were there for a period of time they were able to get veggies and things from the other camps. They would be able to get some—Topaz had some chicken and pork. Yes, chickens and pigs. So, there would be some interchange between the different camps. I don't know how they did it, but they did it from the very top administration. When they were able to use the things that were grown by each camp and shared by the camps. So, they had fresh vegetables and they had—fruit was always something they did not have a lot of. We had—there was a lot of funny fish that we had to eat. When I say funny—I think they said shark meat, we had shark meat. We said "Eew...shark meat". Today, people eat shark meat, they think it's okay. They had whale—somebody said, "This is whale!" We don't know if they were, but people said this is whale meat and we said, "Oh my God, we don't want to eat whale meat". They had different kinds that they served, and all kinds of rumors of what they were. But we didn't know what they really were. They also had lots—they didn't have real dietitians working on this stuff. You might get spaghetti and rice at the same time and you fill up on the—I think everybody gained weight while they were in camp because potatoes and all of that came together with the rice. We did have Shoyu and we did have cooks that prepared—it was really stir-fry most of the time.

We had baths, we had baths put in every block—it was always occupied by the Issei, by the old people. We would go to the shower room and stay there all night because it was warm. My mother would get very upset. She kept saying, "What are you people doing in the shower room?" I said, "We're just talking. Come on over and see, stay with us if you want to." She thought maybe we were running around and maybe having dates, in the shower room, I don't know. It was at night again—one of the reasons why I went to the Nisei Demos group was because there was nothing else to do!

We did have movies. We had—I don't if you ever heard of Hoot Gibson—we would have Hoot Gibson movies. They were cowboy movies of the twenties I think, a very old movie. When it was movie night in the different camps, we were all there. Then, we had again our play things and activities.

The best—I was in charge of some of those classes again, but the—my friends had told me that the best class—they were told the best class of Topaz was the English class for the seniors. For the Issei. They all learned their English. My mother was so happy to go to English class because she always wanted to go to school to learn English. But with seven children she didn't have the time. Now she had the time, she also learned—my mother also learned about The American Constitution. Of all things! They had a lesson on the American government, and my mother went to it. In 1952 when the law was passed that the Japanese could become citizens my mother went through it very well. She remembered what she had learned and she built up on it and took her test and passed with flying colors. We said my mother and father both got some of that from the camps, which we never expected.

Did you go to school in the camp?

No, because if I went, I would be a teacher. They were taking anybody with a college education to be a teacher. We had teachers from the outside, so that I got to know some of the people after the camp and enjoyed them very much. They were in the camps and they were white teachers. Some of them were people who refused to go to the war. They were—war resisters—I don't know what—pacifists. They were pacifists—did not want to go to war, some of them volunteered to come to the camps. So then they came to the camps and they became our teachers. We had teachers both—mostly camp people—but the problem that we ran into was that the teachers were the first people to leave the camp when outside opened up and we can go on to colleges and go on for your master degree or go on for you B.A. The teachers who had some college went of fairly quickly—relocated very quickly. I have a friend Daisy who was a senior in high school and she said she taught high school because there were no teachers. You had the changing climate once the government started the change of getting us out of camp rather than keeping us there for the duration. Then you had people leaving camp and the ones who left were the ones who were most able to get jobs or people who were really able to go on continue their education. What you had left by the time Topaz closed you had almost half the people were still there, but they were the parents and they were the wives and the children of the service men. So you had—I was surprised when I read the statistics—over half of the people in Topaz still there for four years.

I'm curious about communication within the camp. Information coming from the outside as well as information within the camp, how did words spread?

We had a newspaper. We had a newspaper—a daily newspaper, which gave us some of the news from outside of the camp that had to do with what we were going to be doing in the camp, and what the problems were etc. The newspaper was not censored, but it was self-centered—self-centered in that the editors really just wrote about things that the administration gave them and little articles. Little articles like—we had a column like, Dear Abby column, in one of them and it's fascinating to read some of them now because they have things like "I can't get a date to go to this dance. What could I do?" or, "My mother says I have to come home by ten o clock. What could I do?" All these kinds of things that teenage kids would write in. They had columns and they had I guess I don't think they had editorials, but they were basically information sheets. Again, people said, "Did you get The Chronicle?" I don't remember getting The Chronicle, but we heard about news from the outside from the other people. So, somebody was getting a newspaper and somebody was telling us what was going on.

I can remember when Mike Masaoka came into camp and he was with the JACL. He was a—really a leader of the JACL and he spoke for two hours about what was going on outside. It was fascinating to us because he talked about congressmen and some of the speeches that they made. One of whom—I think it Senator Ranking from Mississippi who talked about putting all the Japanese into an island and leaving them there. That came out in the Congressional Record. He would talk about the hostility that was still rampant outside. I guess about the political scene in Washington D.C., but that was about the only time we heard about anything political. Usually, it was, "Yes, they're still rationing". We were rationed—I think we all gave up our rationing to the camp cooks so that they were able to buy things. My friend got married in camp and she talked about the fact that so—that they would go in the mornings and there would be no sugar for their coffee or anything and they got really incensed because there was no sugar anywhere. They brought it up as a complaint. Then she said it was just—she said she just felt so funny because on her wedding day —they had the wedding in camp—and she said everybody from all around came. She said she had a great big group on her wedding day because nothing else to do on a Sunday and she got married. She said there was this marvelous cake with all the sugar that they had kept—that would go on to everybody in the camp. She said she felt they felt very chagrined that they complained about something like that. There was that kind of sweetness where people did help one another. One of the things I think—I don't if Ernie talked about—but you would go walking out at night and you could smell—you could smell liquor. You could smell—people made sake and they made sake. The people in the kitchens would take the fruits—what few fruits we had etc. and used that as a basis for making sake. So, people had sake in camp. People are very creative in many ways.

Can you explain what sake is?

Sake is Japanese—it's really called Rice Wine, but they can make it out of anything. It's liquor and I don't know how they make it, we just knew we smelled it. I don't know how they made it.