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4-More Camp Observations
How far did you venture without your mother around, where did your friends go?
I would walk to school. I never walked to the canteen, which was where you bought candy, by myself, or go to the movies. There would be a movie once a week, which was in that area. I had got lost going to school, because of dust storms. I think I always thought there would be a dust storm if I wandered too far, so I never went too far from my house. I just made this funny connection; I hate to drive, I do not like to be separated from my home. When I go to St. Louis, I'm OK once I get to St. Louis, but I worry for a week before I go. For some reason I get really uneasy. I think probably that would be the foundational piece for me, because i do not like leaving home. I will not go to the city on my own, because I hate driving. The hating driving has served so that I always have a chauffeur. I am not comfortable traveling. I just don't like to be separated. I think there's a fear of getting abandoned in some ways, that might be from way, way...as a child. I did not go very many places alone, except for places that I could visually see my way back.
Did you feel a strong attachment to your barracks?
No, but it's where my mother was. It was not a comfortable home. It became familiar, certainly, after three years. We slept in those army cots, for all those years, with the wire. I can still hear the mattress crackling in the wire. It's a sound.
Could you feel the wire?
If you moved, you could hear the wire. If you were under the bed, looking up, it was just a familiar thing. I can still see the pattern of the wire against the mattress, which were all these little slingshots, lined up.
Did you ever have any privacy?
I think probably the adults didn't have much privacy. When you're a little kid, you don't really care about so much privacy, or being by yourself. Except if you went to the potty, you didn't feel like going to the potty in your living space. But no, I didn't feel a high need. But I'm sure it was an issue for the young folk, just because it was so cramped. Imagine a place, it couldn't have been that much bigger than this room, with, at one point, four little kids and a mother and a father, or four little kids and a mother. It might have been a little bigger than this; it wasn't luxurious quarters. It was cramped.
Did you spend a lot of time in there? Or did you try to avoid it as much as possible?
No, I think we spent time in there, except you had to go out for meals all the time, so there was probably some going out, and I'm sure my mother, as a great naturalist, took us for walks. Later on, they might have made gardens, but I don't remember that. I saw pictures of people trying to make little gardens because they missed the green, but I don't remember that in Topaz.
When we were little, my mom well by then, my father had left, well, actually maybe not then, but I just remember my mother washing us in the laundry sinks, she'd pop us all in, and try to keep mosquitoes off of us. I remember taking a bath in those sinks, that was one of my first memory of being bathed, were in these sinks, so I would have been five. We were fed in this place—the cook house. People from the camps, those that could cook, would cook the food for all of us in that block, and we would eat communally which was actually, probably when some of the close family ties which were close in the Japanese and Asian cultures, you stay together, and support each other, you do things together, like eat together. The children that were older than I, would be in your age group now, because it was a communal setting, they could take off, and they might have friends in another block and they would go eat with those friends.
Do you remember any sense of when you went to sleep? Or if you had naps, or if your brother had naps?
I remember it being hot, and my mother was very strict with us, in terms of "you go to sleep at 7:30." We would be in our beds, and we didn't protest, we would go to sleep. I asked my mother once, "Where did we get sheets?" She said, "Janet, they didn't have sheets in camp, we slept under these scratchy army blankets." I still remember and see the color of that army brown, or that greenish brown, and the scratchy blankets. But I thought that we had sheets, and I just remembered the blankets, but in fact, we didn't have sheets. Maybe they did later on, but they didn't in the beginning, in the beginning months of camp. It was just army blankets. Everybody got issued two army blankets. You folded it up and there was a mattress, and you slept on that. The mattress was a pallet.
Do you remember what would happen if you became sick?
Luckily, my family was very healthy, and we didn't get sick. I remember having my tonsils removed, in the little hospital. There were Japanese-American doctors and nurses, that they recruited to do that. I think they called it a dispensary, but there was a hospital component, because I remember breathing in that ether, and getting knocked out, and having my tonsils removed. And that was in camp. They did have a hospital of some sort where people were treated, but I think we were remarkably healthy. When my mother delivered my littlest brother, it was in the hospital. I remember tying her shoes because she couldn't sit down, her tummy was too fat to see, and her going to the hospital and coming back a few days later with this little baby. I don't know where he slept, she probably made a crib. My mother made everything, so she probably did that.
Did she build a lot of furniture?
Yeah, because they didn't have any furniture. They were just bare barracks. She'd get the lumber that was left over from building the barracks. She taught my little brother, the naughty one, to get a magnet on a string, and he would go trolling for nails. Then she would use the nails to build this furniture; to build these things. She built a highchair for my little sister. She built chairs for them to sit in, because my dad didn't do anything like that. So she did that kind of stuff. She knew how. She was a farm girl; she could do most anything.
You had your tonsils removed, and afterwards, did you stay there or were you let out [immediately]?
No, I remember staying there. I remember staying there, and their giving me jello as my first food. It was so painful, because it stung, this wound in your throat. I don't know what they were thinking, to give you this orange jello which about killed you. That's really what I remember, and then my parents coming to see me. But I was good, I was a good little girl. I did not complain or cry or do things like that. I left that to my brother. He did it all.
Do you remember if the doctors were Japanese American? And the nurses as well?
Yes, they were interned with us.
Did they make you feel comfortable, or safer, that they were Japanese American, and not just Caucasian?
That was probably true, because it was familiar at that point, that's what I was used to, because that was our community. Where in Pescadero, it was farmers, like my dad, and farm families. There were people who were very kind to my parents. There was a family called the Nunziatis, who owned this store in Pescadero and they stored some things when my parents left. But I don't remember them, particularly.
Was the hospital a barrack?
Yes, the hospital was basically a barrack. I think probably what it must have been like is if you see movies of wars, like that television movie M*A*S*H*, that's what I think it might have been like. It was in a barracks, but I think it was your bare bones stuff. It was not like Marin General. It was definitely the same kind of building, and I just remember being on the little guerney and breathing in that ether, and counting. You were supposed to count, and I remember I didn't get to ten. They said to count to ten, and I didn't get that far. I was out.
Your mother was pregnant with one of your siblings, and went and gave birth. Did you visit her in the hospital? Because you said she was gone for two days, so were you there with your father?
I don't know if it was two days, but it wasn't very long. I think we were there with my father, and maybe one of my aunts came and took care of us. I don't remember it being a time of being stressed about it. I just knew she was having a baby and that the baby was going to come home, which they did in due time. It was, I think, an easy birth, and an easy pregnancy. As my mother is one of those people, who claims she smiled when she had birth pains. She encouraged me to do that when I had my children.
Did that work out?
Are you serious?! No.
Your grandparents were Issei, so they obviously came to the United States, and what connection did they have with your parents? Were they in Topaz?
No, all the grandparents were gone, and they died young. My grandfather on my mother's side died when they were still in Sacramento. They died when my mother was just out of college, I think, and just before she got married. My grandmother had died, also within a short time. My grandmother, I don't remember but I've been told, that my grandmother died at fifty six. My cousin, I have a cousin who was older than I, she died at fifty six and I was waiting for my fifty sixth birthday because I thought, "Hmm, is there a pattern here?" But luckily I lived beyond that. So that meant, in their mid-fifties, both grandparents died. There were Issei, certainly, that lived longer, much more, like my mother is ninety eight, and she's still down the street here. I don't remember much about my grandparents at all, although I was told that they took me to visit in Sacramento, but I was too young to remember.
