Shigenori and mary kitauchi

Shig and Mary Kitauchi were interviewed jointly for this interview on their lives during and after WWII. Shig was 14 years old when the war broke out, while Mary was 9, and the difference in their perspectives and experiences during the war strike a contrast. However, both recall the chaotic and fearful aftermath from the fallout of Pearl Harbor. One of the most striking memories Shig still holds is the fear that the community had of their fate once they entered camp in Poston. “They built Parker Dam, which held back all the water. And we were below the Parker Dam. So a rumor went around that they were going to break the dam loose and flood all of us out.” This interview was conducted in May of 2002. 

I'd like to start out by asking you, Shig, your full name and when and where you were born. 

Well, name and the Shigenori Kitauchi. I was born May 23rd in Fresno, California, 1927. 

And Mary, your full name, please. 

My full name is Mary Mieko Takemoto.

So Takemoto is your maiden name. And when were you born? 

December 3rd, 1931.

Where were you born? 

Fresno. 

Would you please paint me a picture of what life was like for you before Pearl Harbor? What your family did, what your everyday was like?

Shig: Well, my folks bought a ranch in Orosi in 1936 under somebody else's name. My dad came here in 1906. He left Japan when he was 12 to be with his mother. My grandfather died when he was about six months old, his dad died in Japan.

And she [my grandmother] remarried and left him with my uncle. And she came to Hawaii. Then after that, when my dad was about 12, 13 years old, he joined her in Hawaii and he stayed in Hawaii for about a year and a half or two years and he came to San Francisco. He went on his own here since he was 16.

Adventurous fellow, your father was.

Yes. He went on his own at a young age.

And how did your mother come to marry him? They met each other and around here?

In Kingsburg.

Mary, what was life for you like before Pearl Harbor?

Mary: My parents were vegetable growers, mainly strawberries. They leased land and they planted strawberries. And they had moved quite a few times in those years until just before the war broke out. We had our own ranch just before that. And they bought it in some part of 1938 or so. 

People often don't realize the effect of the Depression and how people are just starting to feel like they're standing on their own two feet and purchasing land. 

And my brother wasn’t old enough but in his name they bought it.

All right. So you remember moving around a lot. 

Well I was born in ‘31 and from there I remember when I was in second grade that first house we had bought there in ‘39. And I started studying grammar school in second grade. You know, being a little kid, I never I used to come home after school, we'd go down and ride a bicycle to Japanese school and at least another seven miles on bicycle to school. I did homework after dark.

So no chores? 

But fighting. Yeah. My brother was always picking on me. 

Oh, there was fighting there. So you grew up completely bilingual. You spoke Japanese with your parents and with your siblings. And how about you? Where did you speak Japanese? And where did you speak in English?

Shig: English mostly in school. My dad was kind of strict about it. He didn't understand what we're saying. If we spoke English, they used to get after us and make us speak Japanese.

In the home.

If he didn't understand, he didn't like it.

Well, yeah. You might be saying something bad about him. 

Mary: He was opposite from my dad. My dad just never had to say– I guess he was never in the house. Oh, he was never sober in the house, you might say. I mean, he had his drink.

When did your parents come to the United States?

I'm not too sure, but my dad did say he was in the 1906 earthquake. He was somewhere in Fresno, somewhere out there. But that's all I know about it. It was the same case as Shig’s parents. It was a second marriage to my mother. 

Oh, her first husband died? 

And she used to have a furo-ya in Fresno. 

Oh, really? 

And all the bachelors that come over and take a bath.

Maybe we can talk about what you remember of Pearl Harbor Day, starting with Shig.

Shig: Like I said, I was scared when I found out. The next morning when I got on that bus and everything was dead still and everything. Nobody said a word, so they saw me come in the bus, and I guess [there was] about six kids in there. When I went to school, I was scared. There was a fella there that I can never forget. And when one guy picked on me, this [other] guy was bigger than the guy that was picking on me. He says, “Leave him alone.” And that's all it took. After that, nobody picked on me. Some guys, in a subtle way, they kind of nudged me or something like that. But it was it was nothing. Nothing major. 

Then there's one girl in our English class, the teacher asked the class if anybody know any kind of a current event. And this girl jumped up and says, “Yeah, I got one. They are going to move all the Japs out of California.” That’s something she said. Then the gal behind me whispered to me, “What they're doing to you guys isn't right.” I mean, I still remember. Her name is Lorraine Smith. Yeah, she understood then and but yet she couldn't speak out.

She could tell you, but not to the whole class. Yeah, but it means a lot to somebody standing up for you.

Knowing that there's somebody that knows what they're doing was wrong. I think people start to understand. For one thing, the teacher called the assembly on December 8th and you call everybody in. And he says we're all Americans. I remember him saying that what happened in Hawaii, this is not the fault of anybody here. He did not specify Japanese or anything. He says it's not the fault of anybody here. So these words and they kind of stuck to me.

How did you hear about it, Pearl Harbor? 

Well a man came up to me, came up to us. We were nonchalantly working and this man came up to us, drove up and says, “How can you be so nonchalant? Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.” That's when everything come to a dead standstill. We were in total disbelief. The first thought that went through my mind: then see what's going to happen to us. See, I was 14 then, so I was old enough to know what the potential might be.

Just for the record, would you be willing to say what the man said in Japanese to you?

[Translated from Japanese] “Are you really that optimistic?  Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.”

That was the exact word that he said. And I just can't forget that. 

Did you say anything back to him? 

I was shocked. I didn't say anything, nobody said anything. Then my dad says, “Honto ka?” [Really?]

And it just let that truth sink in. 

It was a terrible feeling.

I talked to some people who, after Pearl Harbor, didn't know if you should plant or not. And then the word came out, you had to make decisions about what to actually harvest. 

Well, everybody over there was planting tomatoes and so forth in a spring crop. And my dad went on ahead and planted. There’s a lot of guys who planted and a lot of guys who sold their crop thinking, we're going to have to leave right away. But in my dad's case, a guy came over there and offered him, what was it, about $100 for the whole patch of tomatoes that we had.

And he got when the guy made that offer, so he kept it and consequently we made money out of that. We left August 4th, and tomato season doesn’t end until June. 

You see, in the end of their harvesting period, they were in a Fresno assembly center. And they said they're having some food shortage over there, or they could use fresh tomatoes. There's one fellow that organized. So everybody, all the Japanese people there farming tomatoes donated, including my dad, he donated. I know they took in three loads of tomatoes.

I think this might be the first time I heard about how the Japanese community hadn't gone into the assembly center yet and helped out the community that was already there. 

All right, well, now I'll ask Mary, your recollections of the day Pearl Harbor was bombed. 

Mary: Well, I didn't know anything about it. Nothing on the day. So we went and, like I say, went to school on Monday as usual, at the school and before school, of course, you play with your friends and nothing went wrong that I can recall.

Now, how old were you? 

I was only nine. Oh, one thing is, once class started. The teacher said that she wants to talk today before class starts. She's dismissed all the Japanese people. So they dismissed all the kids and told them to go home.

So what did you feel like? Your teacher just announcing, you know, 

Well I was happy I didn’t have to go to school.

Do you remember exact words? 

Yeah. She just stood there. She says, “Alright class before we begin, they said today we had some difficulty with Japan. So Japanese children are dismissed to go home.” She didn’t say why, I don’t remember but I’m sure a lot of kids knew. Once I got home, my dad asked why are you home from school, and he knew already.

In your little nine year old mind, what did that mean to you? 

I didn't know anything. I didn’t know what was going on really, I just didn’t know anything. You got told what to do so I do it and whatever, you know. 

What were some of your fears? I know there were rumors flying around.

Shig: What was going to happen to us.

Do you remember reading the evacuation notice?

No, I didn't read it. They just told us we're going to have to gather in Visalia, in the auditorium. They called us for a physical. All the Doc did was look in our eyes, tell us to open our mouth, that’s all he did. That was the physical. Then we went to camp.

Do you remember your family disposing of anything?

Oh yeah. Got rid of everything as cheap or as quick as we can. And we had one room that we stored things in, like a washing machine or refrigerator. He said when we come back were going to need it. So we used that to store some clothes in there and we had various things in there that we had stored. Something we would need immediately upon return.

So you already had your house and ranch? 

Yes. 

And who took care of those?

We had a Mexican family take care. 

Oh, somebody that you trusted.

We thought we did. Oh, they're the guys that wouldn’t leave.

When you came back? 

Yes.

Did you burn things? Did you bury things? Did you break things?

Well, my dad was afraid to turn in his pistol, so he threw it down our country style toilet. He figured they might figure out a concealed weapon. He turned in the shotgun and the camera and radio, shortwave radio.

Do you remember taking photographs?

Photographs, he burned them.

Did you have a butsudan or anything? What happened to them? 

Burned it. 

You know, when I hear people chopping up their butsudan and burning it and it's such a family treasure. 

It is. Well, it makes me feel kind of uncomfortable thinking about it. He was afraid that the FBI was going to come over there and start to search and then they find something they thought that's going to be incriminating. So that's the first thing he burned. We had some Japanese records, and he broke up all that and burned that.

How could you burn records?

Oh, it wasn't easy. He threw it underneath the furo. 

Mary: Oh, we buried ours under the house. My mother, she came in the house one morning and she broke it because we sold the ranch. I guess it was pretty cheap. I mean my brother did all the business. But I remember breaking all the Japanese records and tossing them. 

How did you feel breaking the record?

Oh I guess I had fun breaking them, I was a kid you know how kids are.

Shig: The kitchen was the first thing the FBI checked. They looked at everything. They looked at the whole house from one end to the other. And I was showing them the way.

So your house got searched by the FBI. Did they pull things out or were they respectful?

They were very respectful. And me, I was just a 14 year old kid. There was a short guy, so and I was leading them around and showed in different places all through the house because they wanted to go see that, see the house and go through it to him. Two of them came in. I let him through there. They trusted me.

What were they looking for? What did they expect to find?

Well, they wanted weapons and camera and radio.

They really thought you were spying.

Well, they wanted to make sure we're not spying. So they asked me where we had any guns, and I says, “Well, we have a .22 and we have a shotgun. And we turned it into the local sheriff. And also we had a camera and a shortwave radio. We had to turn that in.” So I told them all of that and he asked if we had a  receipt. And I said, “Yeah, I got a receipt.” I showed it to him. So they were satisfied.

And so they were pretty businesslike then? 

Yes. Strictly business. But they were really activist gentlemen. They weren't trying to coerce me into anything.

Right. And you've probably said in the last video, but how did you get chosen to be the one to show them around?

Oh, my dad told me since I was the youngest and the smallest one, you go and show them the house.

Right. And as a 14 year old, you understood what was going on?

Yes, I knew what was going on. And I knew they were looking for some kind of weapon and so forth. And we didn't have any.

Okay, well, I'm going to ask Mary if anything like that happened in your house or did the FBI come to your house? 

Mary: I really don't remember anything. I was always out. I was just that happy go lucky type, I didn’t care, being the youngest.

So, were you involved in packing? 

Yeah, I helped my mother do some things.

How was that to pack? I mean, I'm sure you had lots of different emotions. 

Yes, I helped her break the records because we couldn't take it with us. 

You were breaking them by throwing them on the ground or with a hammer or– 

Stepping on them. 

That must have felt very strange. Shig, you showing the FBI around or breaking the record, things were explained that “this is war time.” Is that how you understood the change in your life? 

Shig: Well, for one thing, when Pearl Harbor was bombed and we found out about it, I think first thought that came to mind was, “What's going to happen to us?”

Did your friends who were also your age understand that? 

We never discussed it. Never did discuss that with anybody. I just absolutely didn't say nothing to nobody about that. And nobody ever talked to me about it.

How about [seeing people at] church?

Well, no more church or Japanese school that we used to go to. They shut that down December 7th. That was it. Did no more church activity, well, the Methodist Church did. 

If you were Christian. Oh, my gosh.

Shig: Buddhist church. They just shut everything down.

Mary: I went every day after school for a few hours. 

I you know, it's really hard for me to imagine not having been there how a topic could be so taboo. I mean still nowadays if you, if it's a horrible crime that happened to you, you might not talk about it but that's the only reference I have. It had to have been so bad that talking about it might make it worse or something, you know?

Shig: And it was something my dad also told me to be quiet and keep a low profile. I think that's the way it was with all Issei around where I live. Because we didn't discuss anything. We didn't pretend. We didn’t want to create any disturbance.

Right. Don't make waves. That sounds down to earth and very Japanese and, and a good survival strategy too. So we were talking about packing for so-called evacuate. Can you tell me what you remember that Shig?

Shig: We had a family number. And everything. We were able to just carry so much on the train. Fortunately there was a fella on our area that knew something about the railroad, you know, just renting cars, freight cars and so forth. So he rented about four or five freight cars and hired a bunch of guys and we took our things, you know, whatever we wanted to take. We were able to take like beds and so forth. So he set it up and we were able to take quite a few things there that we wouldn't have been able to carry on to the train with us.

This is a Caucasian man?

No, Nihonjin. 

But he had a connection. 

Yes.

Oh, my gosh. This is the first time I heard something like that.

Yeah, we just got the word after he rented about four or five freight cars and put your name and destination, we already knew it was going to Poston Three. So he just rented cars to go to Arizona. The nearest town there, which is Parker. And they had trucks over there to pick up the things and bring it to Camp Three. And we went after our stuff. So to us, it was a big help.

So you got to camp before the freight cars arrived.

We were there about, I guess about a week before. It took us about a week to get our stuff.

Have you heard this before Mary? No. This is the first time. This is something that happened in 1942.

Mary: Well we just went in with the stuff we could carry. All I had was a bag of candy. My mother had thrown a big bag of candy and gum in there. And then my brother above me had to carry the iron for clothes. We didn’t package anything like that. Just clothes. It was to the assembly centers first and we stayed there six months. Then we went over to Jerome, Arkansas. Then came back to Arizona. 

And the reason why you went to Gila is?

Because the closed up Jerome. 

Oh, okay. You make it sound pretty easy, but you must have had worries as a nine year old.

Well I was scared, I didn’t know where we were going. I didn’t want to go to Arkansas.

Did you know where Arkansas was? 

No. All I knew was I got to ride the train. I guess it was three days and or three nights or four days and three nights or something like that to get to Arkansas. My mother was ill she had low blood pressure.  So we didn't want her to go to Gila thinking it would be too hot for her.

Did she do okay in Gila, Arizona?

Oh yes.

What kind of worries did you have as a nine year old? I mean, your imagination could run wild or you could just focus on playing in your room kind of thing. 

Well I was always scared. 

Always scared. What did you imagine could happen? 

My brother right above me used to always tease me and scare me. Saying, “They are going to come get you or…”

Oh no. You had a mean brother. 

So I had nightmares every night when I went to bed, even before the war. You would hear a siren going off and he would say the cops are coming after you, you better go hide in the house.

Ah, you were the perfect little sister to tease. Well, you know, I heard from one woman and I forget she was where she was from originally, but she said there was a rumor going around that the government was going to put all the Japanese people inland and then drop a bomb on them. You've heard that rumor, too. You did? So it was going around in these parts, too?

Shig: Well, in Poston, see the Colorado River was there. They build a dam at Parker Dam which held back all the water. And we were below the Parker Dam. So a rumor went around that they were going to break the dam loose and flood all of us out. Yeah, that was a rumor early when I first got to Poston.

Well, did you believe it?

I didn't know whether to believe it or not. So, first thing I was thinking was, well, if we find out the dam was broken or cut or whatever, we run to the mountains.

So you had an escape plan in your mind?

Yes, we definitely did.

Well, I'm going to ask Mary. Besides your brother teasing you, were there other things that scared you? 

No.

Shig, do you remember seeing soldiers with their bayonets?

Shig: The soldiers on the train we were in were nice. See, I went toward the back end of the car, and a guy, one soldier came up to me says, “Hey, hey, pal, go back inside. The captain don't want anybody out here.” And I walked right back in. And he was happy and I was happy.

Well, it's kind of reassuring if he calls you a pal rather than some other three letter words.

Yes. Yeah, he could have just outright said a few things, chewed me out. He just told me to get back in. So I got back in. Everything was fine.

Yeah. I try to imagine what it would be like to be a Caucasian soldier on a train with a bunch of families, you know, mostly farmers. Are you supposed to take the orders really seriously that these are dangerous “enemy aliens” or I mean, how would you think, as a young soldier. Do you remember food on the train? 

Mary: No I really don’t.

Shig: Well we had taken sandwiches, brown bag sandwiches, and they tossed them out to us, and ours were alright. Water was clean. Because if it was dirty water, I sure would remember it.

How about you, Mary? Do you remember how food was or how people treated you when you got to Jerome? 

Mary: Yeah. Food was okay. We were lucky to have a cook in our block, 

A professional cook?

Not a professional. But he used to be a cook when he was in Fresno. That's why the other camps they used to come to our mess hall because they thought our food was better. We all got the same thing, you know but its just the way you cook it.

Also another woman I talked to said if you had a baby and the baby had special needs, couldn't drink mother's milk or just a regular formula, then you were in big trouble because the Army didn't have special formula for babies. Did you hear anything like that about people with special needs that didn't get it? 

Yeah, I know a few people back in Dinuba here that they talk about it now. They lost a child while they were in camp. 

They were just infants, the children? 

Mary: A lot of people said they lost a child. Stillborn or just after. My niece when she was born they said she was dead. They had her in a shoe box said she was dead but she wasn’t. And it just happened that a doctor from the outside came in and checked the baby, my niece, and said what’s the matter with this baby? They said she’s dead and the doctor said “No she’s not, she can be saved.”

So she was saved. 

She got her father’s blood direct transfer. And saved her life. But they had put her in a shoe box saying no, she’s dead. Because I guess she was about seven months premature.

Or seven months premature, so she was two months early or something?

My sister fell in the mess hall and so she had an early birth.

So the people who said that she was dead – 

Doctors that worked in the camp hospital. 

Who didn't have much experience? 

I think so. This was at Tule Lake. She was at Tule Lake for the first part of camp.

So your sister was at Tule Lake.

Because she was living in Sacramento. She got married January then she had to go to camp. 

Oh that's a pretty heart wrenching story, isn't that. 

So she was there when the doctor came. 

Yeah. And so the doctor just happened to be there.

I guess they used to have one doctor come in every so often to check out the patients. She was one of the lucky ones. I guess there were doctors that came to camp with us that I guess were…practicing.

Shig: Not really qualified.

Mary: For the assembly center doctor, Dr. Tara, he said when he first went there they just had a bottle of alcohol and castor oil in the pharmacy. At that time they had the food poisoning there. Dr. Tara was talking to a bunch of people and he ran into the pharmacy because he knew they were having food poisoning. He went inside the pharmacy and all he saw was a bottle of alcohol and castor oil. That was the total supply in the pharmacy.

So he went to the administrator, went to the local pharmacy and picked up everything they had and brought it back in there. Dr. Tara was saying this is, it's really amazing but nobody died.

Mary: That was scary because I was still pretty small and they were all outside in the beds. They pulled the beds outside on hot days. 

In your young mind you didn't know if they were all going to die, or knew if they were all going to die or not.

But as my dad was going around helping as much as he could. Know my mother was at home but. So I ran to my neighbors camp. Whenever I see somebody else sick, I thought I’d get sick. 

Oh. Just psychologically, huh? 

Yeah. Psychological. It didn't matter because I was at my friend's house in the next block but I was still watching everybody come out and get sick, you know.

So were you traumatized every year that you were in camp or do you have good memories of camp?

Oh I have good memories because all I had to do was play with my friends and do the laundry. 

Oh, you did? Yeah. You did do a chore. 

I did the laundry. And my mother wasn't too healthy. So I helped because I had my two sisters that got married in camp. So I was by myself of the girls. I did the family chores. 

What was that like? Because depending on which camp you were in, there was dust all over the place and I can imagine laundry not being clean because you put it out to dry and it gets all dirty again.

Mary: Yeah. We had one big laundry room. I think so. Wash board. I used to soak my clothes and play, I think we had a ping pong table in there and I used to soak my clothes with soap. Go back and wash them and rinse them out. 

So you had a good routine?

In-between games. Yeah I had fun in camp.

Well, did you do any laundry?

Shig: No, not me. But I did have to help hang it. My mother used to be real short and the laundry line my brother put up. It was a little bit too tall for her to reach. She had to get on her tiptoes, so I used to help her hang the laundry. But I also had to watch it. If the dust storm comes in you bring it all in, whether it's dry or not.

Well I can sort of imagine everybody has their clothes out and somebody calls out that there’s a dust storm coming…

Something like that. Because you see a dust storm coming. So everybody's running out there to bring their laundry and it's wet yet, when you throw it back in a tub or basket or whatever, you got to cover it up so the dust don't get to it. After the dust blows over, a dust storm blows over it, and we go back there and hang it out again.

It depends on the dust particle size, huh? If it's really, really fine. I heard that Topaz was really alkaline and fine, like cornstarch. Oh, can you imagine that? That fine dust, huh? Well, tell me about the dust storms in Gila. 

Mary: Well this happened when we were going to a movie. We would go up the hill and the theaters were at the bottom of the hill. We had to climb. And we lay there and watch the movie and if the dust storms came, we would have to run home. They would stop the movie. 

Shig: I remember one in Poston. They're showing us a movie, this is all outside. Then the storm came. They turned the camera off and all of the sudden the screen ripped.

Oh, the wind just ripped the whole screen out.

Everybody was there for one reason. We were all interned. Yeah. And everybody knew that. So anybody knew anything? Always tried to help others.

So that the same with the cooks. if you knew how to cook rice for 250 people, you can teach it to somebody else.

Well that's what, that's what did happen. See because we're all a bunch of farmers and our block there wasn't a cook you know. Right. We didn’t know how to cook a pot of rice. You know, small individual family type pot of rice. We can cook, but for a mass of people, you don't know how to cook that. And the whole block and our whole mess hall. Everybody in that block, we all got a melon to eat. Oh, they were so good.

Do you remember anything about the dances?

Yeah. We used to go to all the dances. School dances. That's where I learned to dance. Well, I just like the outdoors. So we used to go to the river quite often. Then we used to go up to the mountains. We’d go out and do some fishing. I used to enjoy it. And they used to have an abandoned gold mine over there that we used to go see.

So were you free to go in and out to do that.

Yes. Long as you didn't get on the highway.

I see, that was sort of the rule. Now some camps didn't even have barbed wire fences around it.

And the internment camps in Santa Fe, where they had camps, they had two rows of barbed wire on that one.

And you know people who were at Santa Fe? We haven't gotten to that part of the story yet. And what happened? 

I was one of those renunciants.

Oh, would you mind talking about that?

Well, for one thing, see, my folks used to tell me says, hey, what's that citizenship doing. You get thrown in camp. So get rid of it so you don't have to go in the army. That was their whole idea.

And did you agree with them?

No. I just had to go along with them. They were pretty dominant and dictatorial. Consequently I wound up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And they did have a double roll barbed wire fence and they used to patrol in between it.

How many were there at Santa Fe when you were there?

Gee I don't know. It was about four or five hundred people there. And I remember as one rich guy who got sent in there, he was out there smoking a cigar. Family used to send me cigar all the time.

That's an ironic scene, huh?

And he never wore the clothes that was issued to him. He always had his dress pants on. And his own shoes.

He had style, huh?

Oh, he had style. Smoking a cigar. I was there ‘til April of ‘46.

Right. Okay. I think most people got out by then. 

I guess I was one of the earlier one to get released.

Right. Did you make any trouble with part of the hoshidan, or anything like that? 

No, no, no. I was just, I was more into quiet ones. I didn't make no waves.

You just quietly applied to be a renunciant. Well how about your older brother? Did he do the same?

And he also refused the draft. They tried to draft him and he refused to go.

So you applied to renounce and did you actually have your citizenship taken away?

I was stateless. If I left the States, I would have been refused entry. But when they drafted me in the Army, I went in 1950.

This is the Korean War?

Yes.

Oh, so you were stateless for until then?

No. Still stateless. But while I was in the army, they didn't. Even if I was going overseas. Well, I wasn't going on my own. I was forced to go. So anyway, I got my citizenship back from that.

Do you have strong feelings about having been stateless for years?

Let’s see, I was stateless from August of ‘45 until 1950. So I'd about five years I was stateless.

Did that cause you any difficulties?

Not really because soon as I got in there, they give me my citizenship back. And everything was going back to normal. If I was a month younger, I wouldn't have had to give it up. Because I turned 18 in May.

So you're okay with that just because it didn't happen to hurt your career or you think it was sort of a raw deal to be asked in the first place.

I never did give it a lot of thought. One way or the other.

Well some people got flak from other Japanese Americans. 

I did. 

You did. Like from your friends or from your neighbors or –  

Everybody. Just about everybody in Orosi.

Oh. So it wasn't a typical thing. 

No my brother and I were the only ones.

Oh, that takes guts.

So I didn't want to stay there, basically. But we had to farm there and gradually things eased up and guys forgot about it. We started mingling with the people.

You know the loyalty questionnaire is really, really interesting to me because I don't know what I would have answered. And everybody tells me their different opinions. Well, what's your reaction to those questions about loyalty to Japan and the Emperor and serving in the U.S. armed forces?

Well, I was never asked that because I wasn't quite old enough.

Was it that dangerous to speak up?

It was very dangerous. If you said something negative, look they were after you. I mean, there are people after you. When that loyalty question came, I'm pretty sure some of these, especially these Kibei people that call them spies and this and that, you know the term they used to used, inu.  So they're out there trying to get some people in there and one fella had to sneak out in the middle of the night just to get out of camp and for his own safety. I remember that happened. So at times like that, it's better to stay neutral rather than being too outspoken.

I’ll ask Mary, I know you were very young. Were you aware of these loyalty questionnaires?

Mary: My parents never said anything.

Well, you mentioned a little bit in Orosi you said that, you know, you were an outcast for a while. Do you think it might be permanent?

Well I guess because I did serve, nobody bothered me.

Would you have renounced if your parents weren't around? I mean, you just did what they told you to. Do you feel any negative feelings towards the government?

Well, if I'm going to live here, I better not.

What did you think about the redress movement? 

Well, the way I felt, $20,000 basically wasn't enough. If they were to give those $20,000 back in 1946, it would have been adequate. But to get into almost 1990 and give us $20,000, can't do nothing but buy a cheap car. But we got something. It's better than nothing.

Did the apology letter mean something to you?

It helps. Yeah, it definitely helps. Kind of soothe their feelings you might say. Although some guys feel you don't deserve anything like that. That feeling was there. I kind of overheard a guy saying “Ah, heck. These guys are doing all right. What do they need it now for?” It's not the matter of needing it or what. It just the whole, the whole thing as an apology was necessary, I think.

If you had redress your way, what would have been different? What would have been an ideal way for the government to apologize? Besides it happening right in 1946? 

Basically, what had happened shouldn't have happened to begin with. But the national hysteria and time, you might say in 1942, we had no clout. Because in 1946 when these guys are coming back, I know two families’ homes got shot into. Both of them was drive by shooting. They fired right through their house. Luckily nobody got hurt. Yeah, and certain stores that would cater to you won't serve you. In the grocery store, we couldn’t shop anywhere. Fortunately there was one fella who didn't care what others in the public thought, he was going to service us. The guy that we used to deliver gasoline before the war, he refused to deliver gas to us.

Mary, what are your comments about the redress movement? Was $20,000 enough? 

You know like he said, if it was back in ‘46. Maybe, but now it’s a drop in the bucket. And a lot of people are gone that would have gotten it. 

Did your parents get it?

No they were gone.

I know that it was tough. Well I have two questions. Is there some message that you can give to young people today? I know I'm springing on a big question on you. Do you think this could happen again? 

Shig: I hope not. I really hope not. 

I mean, if you could teach young people anything? 

Keep an open mind. You know, not everybody is going to create the problem.

Interview conducted by Grace Megumi Fleming. JAMsj thanks Grace for allowing the museum to archive and share these oral histories