Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Bob Fuchigami Interview
Narrator: Bob Fuchigami
Interviewer: Richard Potashin
Location: Denver, Colorado
Date: May 14, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-fbob-01-0020

BF: No, no books to begin with. Later on we got, we got some discarded, outdated books. But there was a teacher with a chalkboard in front and they would put the information, some of the information on the chalkboard and we'd just copy it. So we, we had tablets and copied the information from the textbook. Then, lecture and that, that was the educational process for several months. The... we had, there was a high turnover of teachers because these, these were teachers -- we had some good teachers, but -- I'd have to say that by and large, the quality of, of teachers was, was not very good at first. There's a high turnover. Because they didn't know the conditions that they would be living under. Although they lived in Lamar and came by bus to Amache. But they weren't prepared to, to deal with the population. First of all, they must have looked at us like, how come... these are all Japanese Americans. They had never seen that kind of population. We hadn't, I hadn't seen such a population except for the language school. And so there was a high turnover. Some had, some of the teachers had come from Indian reservations some had come from... teachers who had just finished college. 'Course, I'm sure they expected that we would have books and desks and things like that. We didn't.

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