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What do you think was the one thing about internment that made the resettlement process so difficult?

We lost everything. We had to start over again. I mean, when we moved into this apartment, the Hotel, that's where we were, we didn't even have a refrigerator. Somebody gave us an icebox, so we had the iceman come and put the ice in there and we'd have to change the pan. We didn't have an oven, we had a hotplate with two burners and that's what we were cooking on. We didn't have a sofa, we didn't have anything. We had a closet and beds, we had a kitchen table and three chairs. So, we had nothing. We were starting from absolute scratch and when a person is sixty years old, that's pretty tough. We helped him make bed and we helped him clean toilets, I just hated to do that, you know? It was hard; it was very, very difficult.

What kept you strong through all of that?

Our father was very strong. I think he was a very spiritual person. He had this faith that everything would be OK. And, his children were very important to him. So, he would do anything to make it OK so that we would be OK.

What happened to the piano?

Winifred, just as she said, had kept it for us and when we came back, which was five years later she returned it to us. Now, the sad part about it was that—she apologized and apologized when she returned it to us—she said, “You know, I had to keep it by a heater, because there was no other place that I could put it in our apartment. I'm so sorry. The finish doesn't look very good”. Well, when I had peeled back the cover, the whole thing had chipped. You know how it turns kind of whitish? So, it was not in very good shape. But, we have it today, we still have it today, not re-finished, it still looks the way it did. It used to be a beautiful, beautiful piano because my sisters would clean it, and really give it a lot of attention and care before the war.

What happened after your father had a heart attack? What happened to your family?

What happened then was it just so happened that my sister, who was in Cincinnati, thought that maybe she would come back to see if she could help out. She was planning on going back to Cincinnati because that's where she had made a lot of friends and everything. Then, just months or so before my father had a heart attack—it was really quite amazing timing on that—she kind of took over the books because remember she had been a secretary and had started to do the cleaning and all of this. And father then after this then tried to work with his heart attack. He shouldn't have, but he did. He then got a stroke and he couldn't work. So my sister then took over the hotel. At that point, I was about—I graduated when I was seventeen—and so, at eighteen I went to nursing school.

Section below transcribed Jane P ('08), cleaned by Alexander F (intern). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org.

You wanted to be a nurse from reading those books in the sixth grade?

Yes, the sixth grade.

And that was always your dream?

I feel so fortunate. So many people are so disenchanted with their work and that, and I've loved every minute of being a nurse and having the opportunity to do many, many, many things with my nursing career. A lot of different, interesting jobs; I enjoyed being a visiting nurse, a public health nurse, I did school nursing, and then I enjoyed my teaching, and then I was able to become a nurse practitioner. I worked with medical students. I've done all of these things, and thoroughly enjoyed working with students and loved working with patients and all of that. So I feel—when I finished, I thought, 'Wow, you know, I'm lucky. I really picked the right profession for me.'

Reflecting on Internment Experience

Did it take you a certain amount of time to be able to talk about your experience being interned?

I think the short answer is yes, and partly because I didn't know how to talk about it. We were fed a lot of euphemisms, like instead of being forced to move—the forced removal—it was called, "evacuation." When you evacuate, it's usually for the peoples' good; instead of being called a detention center, it was called an assembly center. Remember, a detention center is where people are incarcerated with armed guards, which is what it was. Instead of calling it a concentration camp—which we now call it—it's called, "internment," or, "relocation camps." And so, when I was trying to think about it and talk about it, I didn't know quite what to say. The other part of it was in high school, when I saw the students that I had left behind, they didn't know what to say to me either. So it was sort of like the big elephant in the room that you don't talk about and this was through my nursing school! We never talked about it. I thought it was sort of something to be ashamed of. It took quite a few years, until I was—I guess 1981 was a really important time. You read about the congressional hearings, right? At that point, I did attend—here in San Francisco—and I heard people's stories, and the outpouring of real, authentic emotions. Suddenly, it occurred to me, 'Wow, yeah, that's true.' With that, at the same time, in nursing, I was trying to figure out how I could translate ethnicity and some of these camp experiences and everything into how you could provide nursing care to patients.

Was that a full...?

Very, Very. Then I did a lot of reading and whatever and I wrote a little chapter with another co-author on that. That's when things started pulling together.

When you start reading and understanding, then you begin to see what it really was. Then I began to talk about it. I probably started talking about it sooner than other people because I was talking about it to my students about what camp meant. Then I was invited to speak to other groups, like social workers, to tell them what it meant to be Japanese and a patient, and how that might influence how they work with them. All of this began to pull together. Then, as time went on, they had an exhibit here on the internment and I was a docent for that. We wrote a book on the internment; it's called From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps. With that, we had a wonderful teacher. He was a young fellow, Brian Komei Dempster who was at that time twenty-nine years old. His grandfather had been interned—well, his mother had been interned, but she was young—so he helped us tell our stories and put it together and write this anthology. So again, all of this helped me. From there, we began to do some outreach work with our stories; we went to the high schools, we went to the colleges. Day of Remembrance is February the nineteenth, and in the month of February there are a lot of activities around the internment. This February, we are going to go to De Anza College to talk about our stories. We are doing a lot of that now.

Is that how you got into contact with Fumi and Masaru?

Yes, yes. Well, I knew Mas from Nikkei in retirement. I knew him from that, and knew he and his wife; but Fumi I met in the writing class.

What about Hiroshi?

I met him in a little different way, but he was telling his story. He is a playwright. He was doing his own monologue about something and then later on we sat and talked about that and we got to meet him. Then I would see him at different functions and we would talk and so forth.

Is he the one you're referring to who went to Tule Lake because he just said 'No'?

No, no. His name is Osaki. Yes, interesting stories.

Why do you feel it is so important for you and all the other Japanese-American internees to tell your stories?

First of all, we're the last of the survivors of this experience. The first generation didn't get a chance to tell their stories, unfortunately. There was about forty years of silence, when nothing was written or talked about. It's up to us now to do it. We're the last who could do it in the first-person. I think that when I talk to people and they say 'Oh, you really were there, you really did that? Tell me more' you know, I think it brings it to life more than something that's written. While we're alive, we've decided—well, I've decided—that it's very important to do this and to tell my story. The other thing I'm finding is that I deepen the story; I understand more, I know more about what's been going on. I hear other peoples' stories, and it becomes a big, large thing that's bigger than any of us. So anyway, that's why it's so important.

Were any types of disagreements or other things like that between people who went to different internment camps?

You know about Tule Lake, is that right? Well, Tule Lake was, in the beginning, just one of the camps, and some of our friends went to Tule Lake. But after the questionnaire came out and they asked them 'Would you give up your citizenship— I mean—your loyalty to the emperor' and all that kind of stuff. There were people who said no, that they would not fight for the United States, etc. Well, those people then went to Tule Lake. Then, people who were in Tule Lake left Tule Lake. And there, they had a stockade, and so it was very different, in terms—and they had riots there. And a lot of the people who went there were Kibei. Kibei were people who were born in the United States, but raised in Japan, then returned to the United States. So they had very split feelings about being Japanese and being an American, kind of thing. And many of them said that, “Well, if you're going to treat us like this, putting us into camp, you know, we're not going to fight for the United States” and so forth. So they went there. So those people were kind of separated out. The rest of the people in the camp were probably pretty much the same in all the camps.

Is there anything we haven't asked you about that you'd like to tell people?

When I go home at night, I'll probably remember a few things! I can't think of anything right now.

I'm just curious—after spending a few hours telling your story, what happens in the evening, is it just a normal evening for you?

Sometimes I go back and thing about these things. Sometimes your questions will sort of stir little different memories or little different things. Then, I also wonder how I did with the interview, there's that part. Then there's a part about this other where I do think about it. Because I am telling this story a lot. I mean, I've done it in many different ways. We do readings and I've also done the storytelling. Never in this depth, I don't think, but I have done that. So, yeah, I think about it. I want to make sure that I got it clear to all of you; I get sort of befuddled in here so I want to make sure that it's clear to you.

Do you have any parting thoughts about our project?

I think it's a very important project, and the reason is that it's something that will last. Something that will be there for the future. Something for the younger generations—and you're the younger generation, but even younger than you—who will be coming along and they too will not have know about it because there's not a whole lot written in the books, even now, I understand. I haven't looked at the history books, but that's what I understand. So this is a way of getting the first-person narrative about how it happened, and I think that's certainly wonderful to have it.

Do you think that there is a moral that is present throughout your whole life thus far?

A moral?

Yes, something that you keep remembering that you should do, or that you want to tell us that we should do, advice for us?

Oh. I don't know about that, but one of the things, when I used to give my docent talks, one of the things I would end up with is something that Thomas Jefferson said. And he would say—and if I get it wrong, because he's [gestures to Howard] a historian over there—,"The price we pay for a democracy is vigilance." And this is what I always end up with when I talk with young people. Because you have to be very, very aware all the time, of what's going on, and if something is happening, you need to be involved. You need to at least be mentally involved with what's happening. And then to get involved after that. Have you heard the story about the—he was a pastor—Niemoller? What he said was that, he said that—his was in Germany. OK, this really touched me, but what he said was ... he said, 'When they came after the communists, I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.'—Who else did they come after?—'When they came after the Jews, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. When they came after me, there was no one left to speak up for me.' And I thought that was so powerful, and you've already heard it but I'd like to remind you of that; because truly, you're the young people that will be making the decisions of tomorrow. I don't say that lightly.

Thank you very, very much.

You are welcome,

[Sato drives away in her yellow VW]