Story about Ann Hino Fujihara and Kiyoshi Fujihara. Interviewed and written up by their daughter Carol Fujihara Harada. Ann Hino Fujihiro war evacuation experience is different because she never went to camp even though she was living in the San Fernando Valley when everyone was ordered to evacuate. Her dad was taken away government agents and sent to a detention center in Santa Fe before all the Japanese on the west coast had to evacuate. He was considered a thread because he was an officer of the San Fernando Valley Japanese language school. This was a school held on Saturdays to teach kids how to read and write Japanese language. Rather to go to camp her mother took Ann and her brothers to move in relatives in Arizona there was a very short window of time in late march in 1942, maybe a week, where the government allowed you to apply for a change of residence notice permit and move inland to a non-evacuated area. For them it was the north east-side of the railroad tracks in Gundale Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. If you lived on the southwest side of the tracks you went to camp. There were 2 camps located in Arizona, Poston and Gila River. Kiyoshi Fujihara, Kiyoshi went directly to Manzanar by bus when the west was evacuated in April of 1942 he said that his saddest moment in Manzanar was when he first arrived. It was close to nightfall and he was given an empty bad and told to fill it with hay to make his own mattress. The barracks were made with green wood. So the floor boards shrank, leaving one inch gaps. When the winds blew dust came up through the floors and covered everything. It was a mess. He spent his first few days at Manzanar getting used to a new routine. Go here, go there, Go here go there, Mess hall for meals. Latrine for showers. Laundry for washing clothes. A separate building for everything. In September 1942 he and his younger brothers signed up to be part of a work crew and headed to the sugar beet fields of Valery Montana, they worked in Montana through November then returned to Manzanar. They also went to Oregon and Idaho as part of different work crews. A ruptured stomach Ulcer landed him back in the Mazanar hospital. Afterwards he was asked to become an orderly he held that position until the end of camp. It was much better than his first job as part of the boiler crew heating up water every day. Every year since he got out of camp he gets together with some of the people he met and worked with at the hospital. Everyone plays lots of poker and pinochle to pass the time. When the camps closed he came to Los Angeles Pasadena and did any work available mainly gardening then he was drafted by the US army and sent to Monterey California and attended the Military Intelligence Service Language School. The US government decided they no longer needed military troops and discharged before he was deployed to the pacific on a GI bill he attended jewelry school and met an engraver who taught him the unique skill of steel engraving he worked as a steel engraver until he retired.
Japanese Internment Camps 