page 4 of 11

Play Movie

Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

4-Tranferred to Topaz

What were your first impressions of Topaz?

I thought we had died. I thought. What they did, the Army Corps of Engineers did, I think, is they just leveled off the desert so they could build the barracks more easily—and so there was no natural greenery, and all that alkaline dirt was like fine dust that flew all the time. They call that area Whirlwood Valley—and there's little dust things going up all the time, and when it rains, the rain doesn't sink in, it just stays up on top.

Were there a lot of sandstorms?

I don't know if they'd be real sandstorms, but there were a lot of whirlwinds going this way, you know. It's finer than what we call sand—it's very powdery, alkaline soil.

Did you make any friends while being in Topaz?

Did I make friends? Yeah, lots and lots, but I've made more since. I know more Topaz people now than when I was actually there. So, we get together, and enjoy each other's company.

Is it easier to talk about your experiences together?

Not really. We might talk about, you know, we might discuss whether so and so, do you remember so and so, the cousin is on such-and-such, he married so and so from some place, but not very much how people actually felt. And I think it's interesting because people don't really think about how they actually felt. I remember going to a artist exhibit that

Minei Okubo was involved in, and she was a speaker that night, and when she started to speak, she cried, and she couldn't stop crying—she kept saying "I don't know why I'm crying, I don't know why I'm crying," but she just couldn't stop. And I think there's a lot of emotional things that are there, but not expressed. And you think, well, I got back, and I did okay, and my kids are okay, my family's okay.

Do you remember any particular Topaz experiences that you find hard to talk about?

Maybe not any one experience. But I remember once around Christmas time, wondering when we'd ever get out of there. And it's sort of like, "Does the government really hate me this much? Do they really think I'm this awful?" It's a hard thing to accept, and there's no answer. I don't blame any individuals, but I've never really been able to be friends with somebody I knew before I went in. Not that I blame them. I don't think I blame them. Still, there's a division. I think that most people don't like to talk about it. They'll talk about going to camp, they'll talk about going to school, they'll talk about going to dances, playing baseball, and talk about who went around with who else, and things like that. But when it comes to a real personal feeling about why we were there, and what it meant, and how we felt about it, I think that most people don't want to talk about it, don't even—maybe even want to think about it.

Why do you think those feelings, as opposed to the actual experience, are hard to talk about?

Why do I think so? I don't know. I think that if somebody doesn't like you, you think OK, that's OK and you kind of maybe stay away. But when it's a legal, wholesale government thing, it feels different. Once at Castro Valley, I talked to a group, just a short thing. They asked, why did you ever come back? But you see, there's nothing we know other than our life here. I never wanted to go to Japan, and I don't know where else I would go—and this is my home. So, I don't know what the answers are. But I think it had deeper meaning for a lot of people that they—well there's nothing you can do about it and they feel like they'll just let it go.

How did you feel about the Loyalty Oath?

The Loyalty Oath didn't concern me too much when I was in Topaz. I didn't think about it too much. But I knew that it made some people very angry. When I see people like that, who are angry, I tend to stay away from them. I think it's like burying my head in the sand. I was not sure exactly what it all meant. I didn't feel like—since I'm the oldest in the family, I had no brothers that were in immediate—anybody that would be called into the army or anything for that. The Loyalty Oath—if they didn't vote a certain way, they wouldn't be able to leave camp. I know that many people were terribly upset with it. It's only been in recent years that I've read about it that I've thought more about it. At the time it was going on, it didn't affect me very much For me it was never any problem because I would never, ever consider going to Japan.

Leaving camp, and going out was far more difficult for many of us than going to camp. When we went to camp, everybody was doing the same thing. If everybody in your high school is doing something, you think, "Well,
I can do it too—if they can all do it, I can do it. If everybody can stand out there in line and wait to go someplace, I can do that too.

And you're in a strange city—I was in St. Louis. I really didn't know anybody, except the man who was the Vice-Principal of our high school in Topaz who helped me get a scholarship to go to school in St. Louis. So I was there, and my sister was there, but she was only thirteen, and taking care of two kids, working for her room and board while she was going to school. So we didn't have a lot of free time, and certainly very little money. But, we always knew that we wouldn't ever think of going to Japan, and my mother and father knew that we'd never go to Japan.

But being out there by ourselves, and never knowing when or where we'd see our folks again was very traumatic. We didn't know when they might be released, and we knew it'd be very difficult for them to get jobs. They didn't have citizenship, had trouble with their English. We just had no idea what the future held for us. I've talked to other people, and they felt very unsure of themselves. A couple of boys my age were out, and then they decided they would go to school, and they went to Yale, and to this high school that was associated there, and they were told, "Topaz High School doesn't exist," so they had to take their senior year over. They went on to a very good school, a couple months later, and did very well.

Going back to the camp, what was your daily life like at Topaz?

The mess hall bell would ring, and we'd have to be ready ahead of time. Then we'd go in for breakfast, and then I went to school. I think that was a good thing. It took up time, and gave us something to do. School was very relaxed. We had very few textbooks. In fact I had the same textbook for English and history for the three years I was there. I used to have a dream, that I never ever graduated from high school, and the last time I ever graduated from anything was junior high. If you took say, Latin, there was no way to take a second year of Latin, it was just not offered. Then I took a course in—something way out—but they had no labs, so we just had picnic benches that we sat on.

Most of the people came from big schools, like Lowell, and schools in San Francisco, Berkeley High, Oakland High, Tech High. Our average grade was about a B. So they were worried that while we were in Topaz, with the average grade of B, that outside schools wouldn't accept such high grades. But they didn't have to worry because it sank down to a C, and then even slightly lower in no time at all. That's because the kids didn't see any—most of the kids didn't see any reason for going to school, and they wouldn't try. The most common expression was just, "waste time." The teachers would say, "Do this" and "Do that", and they'd go, "Waste time" and wouldn't do it. But see when they were going to school before—when they were going to school in San Francisco or Oakland or Berkeley, everybody worked harder, and they wanted to. I think all of our parents wanted us to. Our parents didn't help us with homework the way parents do now, but they let it be known that it was something they expected of us. The schoolwork was our job to do and our job to do well.

Who were your teachers in Topaz?

We had different kinds of teachers. I think in Utah at that time, two years of college got you in as a schoolteacher. We had our resident teachers. These are the people who had gone to Cal, say, and had majored in math or physics or something like that, then they would teach. There were the other people who were school teachers who came to Topaz to teach. Some of them came because they wanted to help us. And others came because it was a good position. They had their own area where they—the administrators and teachers had their own area where they lived.

So other than school, what kind of activities did you guys normally do?

We used to have dances, and most of the guys wouldn't ask anybody to dance for the longest time until it was almost time to quit. We had lots of ball games. We had movies but they were pretty awful, more cartoon type things, and you sat on the floor in a mess hall or a recreation hall.

Were you interested in sports or music, or anything in particular?

I played the piano for church services, and I sang in a trio. I was never too interested in sports, but I'd go watch. When you think of how crowded the place was, little children didn't have a whole lot that they could do. There were not a lot of play apparatus. In fact, I don't know what they did. I only know one thing that a man who's one of the heads of the JCL says. They used to play chicken with the guards in the tower. They'd start a little fire at the bottom of the tower to see if they could get him to jump down. Then he looked at us and said, "Hey, he could have shot us". I said, "Yeah, he could have," because in Topaz there were ten shootings by the guards into the camp. One of the shootings, of course, was fatal.

Do you remember when that happened?

I only heard about it. I was there. He was shot in the chest. He was inside the line , inside the barbed wire. The guard insisted he was trying to get out, but there was no way that he was trying to get out. A friend of mine—my mom told her, "Don't look, don't look," but she had to go look, so she did. She was just a junior high school kid, but she saw him there.

Did that impact the morale?

I think that one reason why, maybe, it didn't impact as much as it could have is he was a single man. He was a bachelor. Actually, he had already gotten his papers to leave camp at the time he was shot. But had he been a father with children and wives, and the wife had friends, and the children had their schoolmates, it would have been much, much worse. They thought they would have an uprising, but they didn't. People were very upset. I don't know what ever happened to him. The only thing that happened was the guard towers were set back another twenty feet. With a rifle I don't know if that matters, another twenty feet?

Did you feel any more scared, or in danger after the incident?

No, but when I read through the papers, there was another shooting accident within a month of that one. Although it wasn't fatal, the guard still shot at somebody. There's just no place you can go. You're in the middle of a great big desert and Topaz is just this one tiny piece of it.

What did your parents do, while they were in camp?

While they were in camp? My Dad worked on a chicken farm. I think what he did was he worked twenty-four hour periods then he'd have more time off. Because he'd live there—it's all within Topaz—and then he'd come back into the area where we were. He used to teach bible study to young people who were primarily Japanese-speaking. I think he really enjoyed it. My Mom would help out with some of the doctors in camp, she would help clean up their places, things like that. She got to sing in a chorus and she just loved that part of it.

You mentioned your Dad was a pretty good cook, right? Did he ever do anything special with the chicken?

No. One of the things that happened in camp was the government—I don't know exactly how it goes—the government didn't allow the Japanese people to have positions of leadership, at least in Tanforan. A lot of the people that worked in the kitchens were not that knowledgeable. I know when our mess hall first opened, my Dad went to help, but he didn't stay there and work. I don't know if he couldn't, or they wouldn't hire him, or what. All the block managers, they had to be citizens. In many ways, I think that had more of an effect on the family than the fact that the kids would eat with other kids. The boys would eat with the boys in their class. So they couldn't be things like the block manager and the council. I think maybe that the war, and all that type of thing—going to the camp and everything, is one of the things that caused the breaking up of the hierarchy in the Japanese community. The men that might have been leaders couldn't be. I think in a lot of ways they lost their hold.