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5-Reflections

Last time we talked about how they don't teach very much about the Japanese Internment.

No, they don't. I like to go on Elderhostel trips. I'm surprised at the number of people who do know about what happened to us. Generally, the general population, you'll find, that they don't know.

Are you satisfied with that fact?

I guess I'm neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. I belong to the Asian task force in Berkeley. They were trying to put more Asian materials into the course studies and into the libraries. At that time we told schools that you don't have this and you don't have that.

Then they turned around and a man at Cal said, "I've really worked on our budget and I've got so many thousand dollars and I'm willing to buy books on Chinese and Japanese and all Asian groups. Give me your list." We didn't have one. So I said to myself, when I can and somebody asks me, I will try. But I don't want to be the guy that goes on saying "Well, you don't have this and you don't do this" and when they say "Okay, let's do it." I don't want to be the guy that says "I'm not ready. I don't have it."

Last time I asked something like, "What do you think we can learn from your experience?" Your answer was that you needed more time. Now that you've had time, I'm still curious.

What do I think of the whole situation?

What can we get out of your experience?

I think that there was a time when somebody thought that they could put all the Arabs into the old concentration camps because they are still there. The Japanese group decided they would go to bat and they gave advice and maybe some of the legal team went to work to help them out. We don't want to condemn whole groups of people for something that goes on way back somewhere else.

I think we need to kind of look at ourselves and see what we're doing. I think it is very, very difficult. Someone once asked me, "Well, then, are all the Japanese without prejudice?" Oh heavens-to-betsy no. You know how it feels to be on the wrong end, so then does that make you a better person? Not necessarily. I look at somebody like the Friends Societies. What they did, and how they continue to do. I think that I'd like to be that way.

I think maybe as individuals you can examine your life, and try to lead your life as best as you can. Lots of times, you just don't know what it is. They say, "Well, all the batteries you're throwing into the..." Oh, is that what's happening to my batteries? There are a lot of things you don't know. You're doing it like everybody else, and you don't know your having a very negative impact. I think when you find out, that is the time when you have to make up your mind to do something.

What's missing in the story? You are an example of someone who was forcibly removed from your home, sent away for 3 years; a very important part of American history. And those of you who who experienced it are older now and in ten or twenty years from now, we won't be able to have this conversation. So, what is missing in the story?

I think you're already past that. My husband was born in 1922, and in Topaz he was something like two years under the average age. Say like, nineteen or twenty was the average are of the person in Topaz. I think really little kids don't know a whole lot about what was going on. As long as their mom and dads are around they don't really care too much about anything else. They don't know any better. I think your primary sources are gone.

You are a primary source. You were at a very interesting age because you were conscous of what was going on, but you were also an adolescent in high school going through adolesence and boys and all of those things. What's really interesting in your story is that mixture of things. If we interviewed an older adult who is older but lucid, their story is proably different.

Very different.

We we found in interviewing – actually this is interesting because we are coming back now after almost a year – what we found in almost all 6 of our interviews with those who were in internment camps is... For is is the frustrating quality of not finding the anger that our generation would have. Can you help us understand that? Do you have any insights into why we are not getting people to talk about anger and rage about what happened.

I don't really remember feeling any anger. I do remember, a couple times, feeling, "Is whatever I am so awful that I have to be put in a place like this?" I think most of my life was spent, up until then, going to school, getting to school, trying to figure out what classes to take.

I'm the oldest in my family, so I used to write notes for my younger brothers and sisters and I would tell them what to take. I didn't know anymore than they did. My mom couldn't. My dad couldn't. So I would say, "Hey you guys have to take algebra this year, you have to take Latin." I made them take Latin. I don't know if they asked me why or not, but they did. So they all took college courses.

How about the anger and the rage of the older generation? Where was it?

You know in a lot of ways, my parents were really shocked by Pearl Harbor. They knew things were going badly. They were shocked by Pearl Harbor. When that Pearl Harbor bit came it was like, "Hey we're part of the country that did this." They knew that something would happen to them. They didn't know what. They knew something would happen to them.

I think, my mother said to me, she was very unhappy that it happened to us. She thought that she and my dad would have to be "grounded" so to speak. In the beginning they were. You couldn't go five miles, you had to be in by eight o'clock at night, and all kinds of things. She didn't think that they would take the kids and do something. She also felt like other immigrant groups, like the blacks, would stand up for us, which didn't happen. I don't think she felt terrible anger. It didn't seem like she did, or they did.

There was a time, I think, my dad was angry enough that he would have gone back to Japan. But my dad was very clear in his mind that we, growing up sort of easy in the United States, could never compete in the Japanese society. You know, where they go to school all day and then they go to the prep school after that.

Anything else you'd like to say?

No.