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When did you find out that you were going to go to
the internment camp?
Soon
after that. On the telephone posts there were these notices that said
that Japanese Americans needed to report—I couldn't read, I was not
an early reader—needed to report to certain areas. It wasn't called
relocation, but there were areas. We
were in San Mateo county so we had to report to Tanforan and because
I didn't read and I was really young this is what I heard. I overheard
that we were going to this place called Tanforan which was for race
horses, they had races—is that still there? No, I think there's
a shopping mall there now—and everybody was upset and we were
packing. My parents were packing and they had to pack everything into
two suitcases per person. Afterwards I asked my mother what was
in those suitcases and she said they had to take some bedding and utensils
to eat, so a tin cup, I remember, and I think those camping plates we
must have had—forks and knives and some clothes. But the clothes
were apparently a problem because they didn't know where they were
going. So it would be like imagining that your parents right now and
yourself, because I had cousins who were your age, who were just suddenly
told you were going—somewhere, and we're not going to tell you where—but you must be there at a certain time.
We
reported into Tanforan and it was very tumultuous and chaotic and I remember
thinking I was going to throw up all the time. I've subsequently seen
pictures of it and it was basically the racetrack and there were some
amusing things about it. One of the first things we had to do was go
with our parents and fill up our mattresses—mattress tickings—because
there were just cots to sleep on. You had to fill it up with the
straw from the stables and they said "make sure you have enough
in it, but not too much." I guess my parents got over-zealous and
they stuffed them full and all night long my little brother kept rolling
off onto the bed and he'd cry and they'd have to put him back on and
they must have had to unstuff it the next day.
We
lived in barracks then. The barracks, I remember, they were hastily
put together and the boards had cracks in them, like this. You could
look down and see the ground underneath the barracks. I had a very
active little brother apparently, who chose to pee between the cracks if he could
and he would also take things and drop them down where somebody had
to crawl after them. He also learned to swear for some reason, so he
would say things like "God damn son of a bitch" and then
he would throw down pennies. He would only have just learned to talk
cause he was, well, he was already three so there was no excuse but
that's what he said.
I
remember there being dried ice. I think because that's probably where
they cooked the food somewhere near the race track, under the stands
or somewhere. There was dry ice and it would, you know, dry ice
sort of does that, and being very scared and not wanting to get near
it. Because it actually looked ghostly to me. I had these fantasies
of—there was barbed wire around the place, posts and barbed wire. I remember going close to the barbed wire and looking out into
what was the rest of civilization. And to this day I can see dead bodies
out there. Of course there were no dead bodies but to me that's
what I thought I saw. A lot of fear that I have came from that time.
So I stayed away from the fence and never would get near it, like phobically
away from it. Because I knew that that was happening out there and
that the rest of the world was terrifying. Instead of what was terrifying
was what was going on so it was kind of a displacement of, a projection
of what was happening. I projected it onto the other world that I no
longer was part of, or that my family was not part of.
When did you go from Tanforan to Topaz?
I
think it was three or four months that we were there. And then we went
on trains, and I have no idea how we got on the train, I mean where
the train departed from, but it was somewhere, obviously, in the Bay
Area. By then we knew we were going to this place called Topaz, Utah,
which was in the desert. It was a long train ride; it was very hot,
I remember, so it must have been summer. When you're a kid it's just
a train ride, you're on a train and it's going clackity-clack and you're
going off somewhere.
At
one point in the middle of the desert where you could see nothing anymore, the train stopped. This is my mother telling me this, because we were
supposed to take a break in the middle of the desert in the heat of
the day. There were MPs, Military Police, that were on the trains riding
in the cars with us. They made a semi-circle around, pointing their
guns at the people who unloaded. My mother was furious, being a good
University of California grad. She yanked, I remember her yanking down
the shades of the train so that we couldn't see. But I had caught a
glimpse of the soldiers making a semi-circle but I did not actually
see them doing that. It was hard to talk about this with them until
I was in college; we never talked about camp. Her comment was "what
did they think we were doing, women and children, in the middle of
the desert? Were we going to run away? To where? To nowhere." It
was the kind of silliness and absurdity that happens at a time like
this when there were no rules or a first time experience.
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