Densho Digital Archive - Mitsuye May Yamada - Joe Yasutake - Tosh Yasutake Interview (denshovh-ymitsuye

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MY: Okay, we went to Lordsburg, New Mexico, in, it must have been May, then.

TY: Yeah, it must have been, yeah.

MY: Because, as I recall that period --

TY: Wait a minute, if I'm not, according to the record, it was in March. So it must, I must have --

MY: Really? Maybe I just remember the "M." As I recall, we really didn't have too much time to think about, about it. From the time you volunteered to the time you went. It was so quick, we didn't, it was after he left, I think that, and then Mike and I started talking about leaving, that Mom got really, really kind of hysterical because she thought we were all leaving her.

AI: I think, in an earlier conversation, you had mentioned that it was March, that you were --

TY: Went to Lordsburg?

AI: -- making plans, and then, and how did you decide that you would try to get permission to go to see your father at Lordsburg?

MY: To see Dad? You know, the thing about, I was talking to Yuri Kochiyama who is, who has all kinds of information about, dates and things like that. And years ago, maybe about fifteen, even, we were talking about this period, and she said, "Do you remember that in 1943, after, about a year after we were in camp, that," that was the period -- she said she read, and I don't know, I wish I had asked her what the source was. She probably doesn't even know, wouldn't remember now, if I asked her, that she had read that it had suddenly, suddenly occurred to the army that after having all of us in camp for, 120,000 of us in camp, in the nine camps, that they kind of tallied up how much money it was costing the government to house and feed us. It was a lot of money. And of course, in 1943 they were just right in the middle of the war. And so they decided to encourage the Nisei to leave. Not the Nisei, but, encourage people to get jobs, go to school or whatever, to leave. Because -- oh, I know what we were doing. We were discussing how, I was telling her how strange it was that it was not difficult for Mike, for me to leave camp, even though I was an alien. That I applied, and I got accepted right away, and that Mike had not answered "yes-yes" to the questionnaire. And because, I'm not exactly sure what the wording was, but he said later, "Well I figured, they asked me if I was" -- what did he say? That "I would forswear allegiance to the Emperor, and I said, 'Well I don't see why I should forswear allegiance to the Emperor, 'cause I didn't swear allegiance to him in the first place.'" Or something like that. I don't know if that's what he told them, but he wrote something in the questionnaire. Which they, they came after him later. But when he left camp, if they were, if they were using the questionnaire to weed out the people who were leaving camp, you'd have thought that I would be prime candidate not to get an acceptance to leave camp. Mike would be a prime candidate not to get accepted, but we both got accept-, got permission to leave camp, and we both left. That was when Yuri told me, "That was when the army was trying to get us out, because..." and I said, "Well, they didn't figure it out before? How much money it was going to cost them?" And she said, well it was, "They had the x-number of dollars that was costing the government to keep all of us in camp, and so they were trying to get as many out as possible, as soon as possible." And that, she said, "You must have applied just around that, that first wave of us who were leaving camp," and it was easy to apply. We'd get to the WRA office, we applied for permission to leave, and we got permission to leave and we left.