My name is Kaz Takahashi and I was born in Vancouver and we moved to Victoria when I was quite young and I went to school in Victoria until relocation occurred, but before that my brother and my father had gone to Japan, just before the war began and that was in 1940 so they were there for six months and we were very afraid that they would not return before the war began. We knew there was going to be a war well before. It was just very scary because I realized that my mother was very worried and of course… but that’s what happened.
When they eventually came back my brother did say that they were the second last boat to return to Canada and we were grateful that they had returned. So there was tension before the war in terms of our family worrying about part of the family not being there. When we were asked to, no — were told to leave — it was sort of very hurriedly done. We left all our supplies and extra things in the back area and thought that it would not be a long period where we would be returning to it. We were quite submissive and agreed to come out. I’m one of five children that came out and I’m the second elder one so I was 10 when we were asked to leave and at that time because, and that’s one thing that’s so good about being Japanese is that the families would glom on together and they would really be quite a supportive group and that’s a real good thing about the Japanese community, I thought, especially in Victoria. So, I didn’t feel any displacement when we left Victoria because everyone was with me. It was kind of neat that way. It was fun in Hastings Park. We stayed there six months and during that time we had a bit of schooling. We had all the adventures of eating in the mess hall and experiencing horrible food and all that kind of thing but it was an adventure and so as children you took it as it came because this was camp, you know, and we were going to be enjoying our camp and we had no idea how long camp was going to last. We thought it was just fun, it was a fun thing to do.
After, we were there in Tashme about a year when my father died. The reason for him going to Japan earlier was because he was ill, I don’t know with what. I wasn’t told, but in Tashme he had cancer of the stomach and he died a year after we lived there. This left my mother a widow and it was very hard on my brother. I was talking to him not long ago because I really didn’t know what was going on. He had said that since our father had died, he had to take over. Young boys had to take over when there wasn’t an adult male there and so he had to work between school and trying to sort of help the family. His experience was not as pleasant as mine. I felt protected; things were good. That first winter, one of my experiences was that it was a terribly cold, cold winter. None of us had ever experienced this cold and I had to go to the store and buy some rice and I had a terrible time getting home. We lived on 8th Avenue which was quite a ways away from the store and it was so cold. I just about froze to death, it felt like, and it was just an awful experience. That’s my one memory of that terrible cold winter we had and of course, the outhouse. No one wanted to go… [lots of laughter here] You had to rush out, hurry, but any way that was part of the experience.
One of the things that I really liked was the bathhouse because we would swim in the bathhouse, it was so big. [lots of laughter] It was great fun and the other thing that was really lots of fun was going out. This was my first experience of outdoor education, you might say, and we’d go on hikes and stuff like that and we enjoyed that. That was fun, and then there used to be gardeners. Everyone used to have a little plot of land that would be gardening and so that was always interesting. Not that I did anything. I just looked at it. I was too busy as a child playing with my childhood friends my age and in our particular house we had a dug out thing. I don’t know if they dug too deep. Anyway there was this hole, right underneath us so maybe three or four of my friends and I would go down into it and have our clubhouse there. This is what we would do, it was fun, and play cards and anything.
So that’s the kind of thing that we would do as a child as we were growing up in the camp. The other thing that was interesting was I marveled at the way, the organization of the Nihonjin. People would take — like the news was very well organized. You noticed how they would have the news, it would go down each avenue and everyone had to pass it on to the next house. I remember that that was very well done I thought, that organization component of the Japanese. So really you felt at home. This was home. We were all connected and it didn’t feel isolating at all for me. I felt very much a part of whatever was going on. The only part I really disliked and that came much later was the infighting — the chatter and the gossiping and oh my, that really didn’t feel good. There was always that, you know, going on. Outside of that we had a relatively smooth relocation.
When my father died, my mother, by this time, there was talk about …well now, the RCMP were really pushing us to go to Japan so we were being not pushed — well, persuaded — very forcefully, to return and I know that my mother thought “well, my goodness, what will I do? I have five children by then and there were no adults, maybe I should go back” and my brother and I just looked at each other and said “We can’t have this.”
We have to do something and so we talked with our minister who had been a missionary in Japan and he could speak to my mother as an adult and we asked him to dissuade my mother from going back because she had this feeling that I guess it’s a Japanese custom where you take the ashes back to Japan and this was an obligatory sort of thing. There was a grave there and all that kind of stuff. Well, outside of that, she had nothing so I think we would have starved if we had gone back. It really was not a very good option for us. He did manage to persuade our mother not to return and I’ll just never forget that because it was a very momentous time for us.
Young as we were, we realized the gravity of the situation and it was the option much like Dorothy [Matsune] went through when she had to go back. I keep thinking, what an alternative that would have been for us and it would have been an extremely difficult one for me to see us surviving that so I was very grateful. So that’s been my most pivotal points, I might say in the experience in Tashme.
Of course, Tashme became the centre of the returnees to go back to Japan so we had to move so we went to Rosebery for a short time and then went to New Denver. New Denver is a nice place to be. I found New Denver was great. There’s a beautiful lake there and the people were very pleasant. The first families integrated with the local community and that was great. I went to high school there and that was fun. That’s my experience with the internment camp.