WE WERE THE "OXEN"

In 1942 during WWII with Japan, about 9000 of us Japanese were put into prison in Southern Idaho where we lived in Block 5. I was eleven and my brother Ted was twelve. Dad, being a businessman, had to be busy all the time. So, out of sheer boredom during those bleak times of imprisonment, he went out for days into the desert with a crow bar and a helmet to look for rocks for a Japanese Rock Garden. I don’t know how he had the ability to go outside the barbed wire fences of Minidoka, but I think the authorities figured that even if we prisoners really wanted to escape, it was all a dry, too hot or too cold desert, and we would come back to the barracks to survive.

One day he discovered this one rock that looked like a stove pipe. It finally took him two months of digging to uncover the whole thing, and he found the hole went all the way from the top to bottom of the rock. It weighs over a ton. Then, Dad had the dilemma of how he was going to get it back to his rock garden, so he built his “Ox Cart”.

There were these piles of left-over wood from when the government had to quickly slap together the barracks to imprison us. I don’t know where Dad got the wheels. I think we could order them from farming equipment catalogs like the Sears Catalogs. Dad attached a rope to the front of the cart so he could pull it.

When Dad was ready, Ted and I were recruited to be the “Oxen”. We got up really early, while it was still cool, and walked about a mile into the desert with no roads. First, we had to get the rock on to the cart, so we turned the cart on it’s side and wedged the ton of the tall rock and cart upright. Dad pulled, while my brother and I pushed, laboring our way back around sage brush and over the rocks and ruts, back to his rock garden behind our barrack.

When the war ended, the government had us list all our belongings. Dad listed the rocks as part of his belongings. For some reason the government didn’t question it and loaded all 68 rocks, several over a ton, onto a truck and brought them to Seattle. Now, I have them in my kind of secret Japanese Garden next to my house on Beacon Hill.