Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Setsu Tsuboi Tanemura Interview
Narrator: Setsu Tsuboi Tanemura
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: November 12, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-tsetsu-01-0015

ST: And the other thing he bought but he didn't tell me or show it to me until we got to the assembly center was, he had friends in the wholesale departments, of course, 'cause he was a businessman so he knew all the wholesale people. At this time, chocolate was already very short. You couldn't get candy bars. And he bought, he had these, they used to have these full boxes of candy bars. And they're not like the candy bars you see nowadays. They were about the size of what we'd probably pay a dollar for. And they were these full boxes of 'em, twenty-four, forty-eight in a box. And he bought maybe three or four boxes of those, and he packed them. And so then when we went to camp, went to the assembly center, he brought them out for me and he said, "Here." He says, "These are for you," and he says, "and you can share them with your friends."

And in fact, right next to our assembly center was the army camp where the soldiers were that were our guards. And we could hear reveille every morning and we would look out and watch them do their marching. They were in a very cramped quarters. And they had the watchtowers over the edges, the fences and everything. But we had quite a large area we could run around. And so we would go out and play. And one day I said, "You know, I feel sorry for the soldiers up in that guard tower just standing there all the time. We should see if they, I'll give, see if they'd like a candy bar." And they said, "Okay." So we ran over there and we waved at them. They were always friendly, they would wave and say hello. And I said, "Would you like a candy bar?" And he said, "No thank you." And we said, and I remember saying something like, "Well, they're good, they're not poisoned." And I said, "I'll open it up and take a bite if you want." And he said, "Oh, we're not allowed to eat on duty, but thank you very much." And I thought, "Oh, how strange. He doesn't even want a candy bar," when I knew they were very hard to get. 'Cause he probably couldn't get 'em either. [Laughs]

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