page 3 of 8

Play Movie

Camp Shelby & Internment

Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

At Camp Shelby, were there conflicts between the Hawaiian and mainland Japanese? Explain.

Yeah, that's a good question. In the Japanese culture, at least in America, it used to be that the Hawaiians were not considered as educated and as elite as they ought to be for their race. That's the lifestyle that they grew up with, like the natives. But the lifestyle of the soldiers that volunteered for the Army were young men, who were 17 years old, most of them. They didn't speak English very well, they spoke Pidgin English—a mixture of Hawaiian, Japanese, English, whatever, you know, it was very difficult for somebody in America, an American born Japanese to understand them.

The other thing is that most of them were raised on the plantations, because they came to Hawaii to work on the pineapple and the sugar plantations. They were very, very much exploited, and they hated the plantation owners. I didn't know that until just a few years ago. But, anything that was representative of a plantation owner, someone who had those attributes; you know, white, big, and who spoke good English, and who exploited the workers, were things that they didn't like, that is the Japanese, Hawaiian Japanese didn't like.

Tell us about some of the conflicts that you saw at Camp Shelby between the mainland Japanese and the Hawaiians.

Yeah, Ok. because of the situations, when I got to camp Shelby, I came from Montana in May, and it's cold in Montana in May, I still had my Long Johns on, and my long sleeves and got bleached out, really bleached out, really white. I spoke good English, and had ROTC, and so I was very good at military training. The soldiers that came from Hawaii saw this and they didn't like it, because I had all the attributes of a plantation owner. So here's a case where they picked on me.

They singled me out and picked on me. Things like, I'd go to a PX, and the PX being the post exchange, the place where you could go and buy beer, and peanuts and stuff like that, and they'd sit on the floor. These guys were not used to wearing shoes, and they were all little, I was small, but they were smaller than me. They had to make special clothes for them, to fit them and they had to make special shoes. They would look at me, and then they'd sit on those beer kegs. I'd walk into the PX and they'd trip me up. They'd do anything to pick a fight. I just wasn't one that they could pick a fight with, so that made it worse. If I'd fought with them then it would have probably solved a lot of the problems, but I just wouldn't get into a fight.

So along with a lot of the mainland guys we became what they call 'Kutunks'. And they were called, they called themselves Buddhaheads. It's a lot in the way which you pronounce these words. A Buddhahead could be spelled B-U-T-A: Butahead, right? Or it could be spelled B-U-D-D-H-A, you know, a Buddha. 'B-U-T-A' in Japanese, is a pig. So they would be pig-headed, right? Or if you take the connotation of being a 'Buddha' then they would have been very religious kind of people, but they weren't. These guys were all warriors. Then the mainland guys were called 'Kutunks', and the reason they were called 'Kutunks', because they thought that we were empty headed. If you do this, if you take your mouth, and make it round like this: Kutunk! The reason for that is that they said, that if you came to Hawaii and a coconut fell off of a tree and hit you on the head it would go 'Kutunk'. So, that was kind of a long way around to your story.

Could you tell us the story of your sister's internment?

I was a student in college when she first went into camp. My sister was living in Los Angeles at the time that the war broke out, and she was married by then. They had a choice of going to any place outside of the restricted zone. the restricted zone, the way they determine where the Japanese would be evacuated from was the width of California: 400 miles. The government just placed a 400-mile strip up and down the coast, all the way to the Canadian border to the Mexican border. They cleared out all of the Japanese, whether they were Japanese American or whoever they were. They had to go to camp.

My sister elected to, well she and her husband elected to go to camp. So they first went to San Anita race track, and that's where they assembled the first bunch of folks that they were evacuating out of the Los Angeles area. The reason they did that, the government did that, was because they didn't have any place, big enough to assemble people. So they had all these horse stalls, and they put people in the horse stalls, and just long enough so that they could sort them out and send them off to other camps in the United States.

It so happened that she was sent to Manzanar. Manzanar is out near Independence, California, right on the border of the Mojave Dessert. It is very, very cold there, because it is right up against the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range.The wind blows really, very bad through that area. So, when she went to camp, it was so cold, because it was getting winter. The barracks that they built, they had big cracks in them. Not only that, but the families were cramped into, well, for size, these barracks were about the size of a boxcar, or a little bit bigger than a boxcar to put two, three families, or four families in there. There was no privacy at all because they didn't have any partitions. They had to put a blanket up or something like that. Then of course they had a Mess Hall.They all had to go to the Mess Hall to eat, and they fed them army rations.

The worst thing for the women was that the restroom facilities weren't private. They were pretty much Army style. The waiting lines were bad, and it was very difficult for her, especially when my nephew was born in camp. So, for a young mother to raise her children in camp was tough. But they managed to survive and the Japanese people that were there made all kinds of progress in making art work out of the local Manzanar bush. They made some beautiful artwork out of that, and they raised—they changed the desert into just sand, sand into real lush gardens. So, that whole valley through the Death Valley is not nearly what it used to be, just because the Japanese were industrious. Even though they were incarcerated they made it—something useful out of the desert.

How did you feel about your sister being interned at the time?

I guess because I was so young and I didn't really feel the impact of the whole thing, I didn't understand so the sociology of it as much as I do now. I just thought it was one of the things we had to do. The Japanese people just do things if they have to do it. They don't complain about it. I didn't feel good about it because my whole family was very close. We'd see each other at all the major holidays, at least, so I probably would not have joined some student rally against it.

Do you want to take that one step further? You explained it a little bit, but what was on your mind at that time, or what was in your cultural sense of the time as to why you wouldn't have protested?

Mainly because there were some protesters that—protesting the government to me was always something that I was against. I was an anti-protester. I just didn't have that sort of—my psyche wasn't geared to that sort of thing, and neither was my sociology. I was a protester. I protested the protestors!

Can you describe your journey to Europe and what you learned from Camp Shelby?

Well, my training in Camp Shelby certainly taught me how to be a soldier and in the field artillery. I learned what I was supposed to do.