Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Joe Yasutake Interview
Narrator: Joe Yasutake
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: October 9, 2002
Densho ID: denshovh-yjoe-01-0018

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JY: Somebody asked me if I would be willing to talk about my camp experience -- a guy named Ken Iwagaki -- to some classes that he was associated with -- it was called the Japanese American Resource Center and Museum at that time -- and so I casually said, "Yeah, I think I could do that." And then he, then about two days later he came back and said, "How about next Thursday?" 'Cause he already, he obviously already had somebody that had asked. So I said, "Well, okay."

And then I suddenly realized I didn't know anything about it. You know? I mean, I had lived through it and so forth, and I suddenly realized I really didn't know anything about camp. So during that week I read feverishly, whatever I could get my hands on, and the more I read the more -- I don't know if it was angry or, you know, just sort of, "What the heck happened?" kind of thing, because I was -- you know, all those years in, in, in my life I just never thought about it, didn't read anything about it, knew nothing about it. And so I, as I read all that stuff, I just started to get much more intense about, about things. So I started going out to classes. And, and as I was doing that, this REgenerations Project came, and he asked me if I would be interested in, you know, being involved in that, so I said, "Sure, that sounds like it might be interesting." And so I got a little more acquainted with oral history, and in fact they took us down to the National Museum and gave us like a three-day seminar class kind of thing on collecting oral histories and so forth.

So that's kind of how I started to get involved in Japanese American history and the incarceration and all that kind of thing. And the more I had got involved with it, the more I realized -- even before 9/11 I was saying that we need to -- because there are things that happen all the time. You know, like when the, when the Oklahoma bombings occurred everybody immediately started to talk about the, the Arabs. And even I can recall seeing accounts of the FBI stopping Arab Americans at airports and interrogating them as to where they were going and why they were going and all that kind of stuff, and it just kinda started reminding me of the kind of things that happened during the Second World War to Japanese Americans. And, of course, since 9/11 it's just really come to, come to the forefront, and, and it just reinforces my, my beliefs that, you know, this ancient history from sixty years ago is just as relevant now as it ever has been and that we really need to press on and keep that story on the, you know, on the -- alive in front of the American people to as many factions as we can get the story to.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.