What life was like in a Japanese American incarceration camp

Here's a map of the camp. It was a huge facility.

It's more like a small city. In fact, it was the third largest city in the whole state of Wyoming at that time. It was made up of 30 blocks. Each block had 24 barracks and each barrack had an average of 25 people.

So it was a very concentrated facility that holds a lot of people.

There were plans to build three schools. When we got there, we noticed something strange. The high school was almost finished, but they never started on the grammar schools.

And so we asked why, you know, we have kids who are grammar school age, and the answer came back. The local people said, don't build anymore schools because we're not prisoners, and we don't get new schools. So why are you building new schools for prisoners?

On the right side you see a barbed wire fence that surrounded the entire complex. And there were guard towers like the one in the foreground. That guard tower held a sentry with a rifle.

If you look in the background on top of the hill, there's another guard tower. And there were nine of these towers around the camp.

Also when I arrived, the government gave me two numbers. They gave everyone two numbers, and we'll never forget these. The first number is my room or cell number.

14 is the block number. 22 is the barrack number. And C is the room within that barrack.

And if you don't remember it, you don't know which barrack to go to, you might get lost because they're all identical. So it's very important that we all remember that first number.

The second number is my prisoner number. I still have it today, 2 6 7 3 7 D.

There were six rooms in each barrack. They all looked the same. The end ones are the smallest. They held couples. Next to the end ones were the biggest. They held families up to seven people. And the middle ones were medium sized families, like my family. They're in red and it had exactly, it was 20 feet by 20 feet, no water, no electricity.

The inside walls, there was none, no dry walls on the inside, no insulation.
You're looking at the inside surface of the outer wall. It was like a storage shed. And that's what it was. And there was no ceiling. So you can hear everything going down the entire barrack through the open ceiling.

We had toilets, and they were embarrassing. If you can imagine 10 toilet bowls. I mean, bowls, no seats. And then no seat covers - 10 bowls. And a line of people after meals, especially after breakfast. 130 people waiting to get in. If you're lucky you got in, and you have a seat, and now you have nine faces looking at you while you're doing your business because there's no partitions. That was not easy, but there was no choice.

The meals were almost impossible. We had bread. We had potatoes, we had pickled vegetables, and in a pitcher, there was powdered milk. The problem is the Japanese did not eat that type of food in 1942.

We love fresh veggies. We like rice. We like fish. We like a little protein in the way of poultry and, and we like fresh eggs and fresh milk.

So as a result, the farmers in our camp built farms. It took a long time just outside the prison. They were allowed to farm the desolate countryside, make it into farms. We grew our own food that helped a lot, but it was a lot of work to be able to do that.

Toward the end of our stay, the government let a few of us go to town into Cody and do some shopping. And that was okay.

I remember taking my father to town and showing him the main street.

That's the picture you see here in those days.

I was showing my father each store. Because he is blind, I have to explain to him, here's a shoe store, here's a restaurant, here's a pharmacy and so forth.

What I saw in every third store had the sign, “No,” and then the "J word."

Awful. That's where I learned for the first time, what real racial hatred meant. And I'll never forget that.

So the people of Cody, a lot of them still had this ill feeling of hatred against Japanese.