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AI: Today is October 6, 2000, and we're here interviewing with Tsuguo "Ike" Ikeda. I'm Alice Ito with the Densho Project, and Dana Hoshide is videographer. Thanks very much again for speaking with us. And I wanted to go back in time once more to the 1940s when you were in high school in Portland, Oregon. And you kept a clippings scrapbook from the newspapers. And I noticed, you were showing me that some of the clippings, and they had to do with the currents events of the day. And, of course, one of the current events was relations between Japan and the U.S. And some of the headlines were pretty big, showing that there were some diplomatic breakdowns between the U.S. and Japan. And I wanted to ask you, as you saw those headlines and you were clipping out those articles, what you thought, if you thought that there truly was the possibility of war between the two countries.

TI: Yeah. I had no guess that there would be such a thing as a war with Japan. I felt those clippings were important because anything about Japanese in Japan or Japanese Americans in America were important information to keep.

AI: But at the time, it didn't enter your head?

TI: No. Like you reviewed recently, it's very interesting how initially the newspaper used the term Nikkei, or a Japanese American, or something of that order rather than later, "Japs." So at least the atmosphere from a newspaper standpoint was fairly reasonable toward us.

AI: And I recall, too, we were looking at your scrapbook and saw a page of articles that included a pretty favorable, sympathetic editorial from The Oregon Journal...

TI: Yeah.

AI: ...about Japanese Americans, and in fact, the Japanese American Citizens League National Convention in Portland that year. You also clipped out some articles having to do with blacks, or as it was written at the time, "Negroes," and their struggle against discrimination, and also some articles about other ethnic groups, European Americans. And I was wondering what your thoughts were at that time as a high schooler?

TI: Right. Well, in camp, I made a vow to myself that this kind of incarceration experience will not happen to any other group of people. So that was the driving thing. And what I did or the kinds of clippings that I kept, I just felt we needed to work together to bring about a better understanding. So it became natural for me.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.