When Japanese Americans were sent to camp, they were only allowed to bring what they could carry in two bags. As it turned out, they were not well prepared for the long time they would be spending in camp. Because of this, they would have to be resourceful in their use of materials as well as rationing those that were provided by the government.

"At first we had nothing to teach with. What I did was I wrote to my first grade teacher Mrs, Pearoff. I was twenty and a junior at USC when the war broke out. She went to the Pasadena High School district warehouse and found some materials that were obsolete. She was able to get those and have a friend bring those up to us and I used that. I would take them and copy the material out of them, and of course we used scratch paper. We didn’t have clean sheets. We checked the penmanship as well as the grammer, and the punctuation. Everything had to be done by hand." (Hitoshi S.)