Interviews

1. Importance of self-representation in legislation

2. The lawsuit set the standard for restoring people’s rights

3. Japanese American, not Japanese

4. Euphemisms

5. People have to believe in what they are doing in order to gain trust

6. Outhouses and showers at camp

7. Interned at age fifteen, I saw camp as an adventure

8. Going to camp with the Terminal Island people

9. Education in camp

10. Trying to get back into camp

William Hohri

(1927-2010) Political Activist

Outhouses and showers at camp

The only thing that really bothered me were the outhouses. They had outhouses at the end of each barracks. And in order to go, you had to climb these steps. It was like going up on stage to go to the bathroom, (laughs) you know? You couldn’t drink the tap water, so they had barrels of water that they could drink out of. But they not did have latrines. They didn’t have any showers, so you couldn’t take a shower.

I don’t remember how the showers—come to think of it, they must have added the showers later. Yeah, they probably didn’t have showers initially, because I remember when they had that first shower. They had one in Block 1. Everybody went down to Block 1 to take a shower, and it was ice cold. It was just melted snow. (groans, laughs)

And we all went down to Block 1 to take a shower. I don’t know what happened in the interim, between that time, if we didn’t take our shower. We had buckets, so you could wash yourself with a bucket. I don’t know. A lot of that is just erased from my mind. (laughs)

The first few weeks or months are pretty spartan. The whole place was spartan, but the first few weeks (laughs) were really particularly spartan because there just wasn’t much there. The worst things were the outhouses. I guess there were no latrines. Yeah. There were no latrines. That’s right. They didn’t build latrines until they got the sewage systems in. That’s why there were no showers.

barracks imprisonment incarceration World War II World War II camps

Date: June 12, 1998

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Darcie Iki, Mitchell Maki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

In 1927, William Hohri was born the youngest of six children in San Francisco, California. Following the outbreak of World War II, he and his family became incarcerated at Manzanar concentration camp in California. A week after his high school graduation, Hohri was released from camp to study at Wheaton College in Wisconsin. In March 1945, Hohri attempted to visit his father in Manzanar and was instead imprisoned for traveling without a permit. Hohri was given an individual exclusion order and forced at gunpoint to leave California by midnight that same day.

Later, Hohri became a member of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), but was disappointed with their disregard to the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. When JACL moved towards supporting a congressional commission to study the concentration camps, a group of Chicago and Seattle dissenters led by Hohri formed the National Council for Japanese American Redress in May 1979, seeking redress through direct individual payments. Initially, Hohri and NCJAR worked with Representative Mike Lowry (D-Washington), but when the resolution was defeated, Hohri and NCJAR redirected their efforts to seek redress through the courts. Hohri, along with twenty four other plaintiffs, filed a class-action lawsuit on March 16, 1983, against the government for twenty-seven billion dollars in damages.

He passed away on Nov. 12, 2010 at age 83. (November 2011)