<Begin Segment 34>

AI: Well, looking back on the whole experience of the internment, what do you think are some of the lasting lessons that you'd like people to think about?

SH: I think that if there was not for evacuation, we would have continued on for quite a while. Population would have gotten bigger, but people in Seattle would have been just staying around here, San Francisco, L.A. It dispersed more persons of Japanese ancestry to the rest of the country. Now you find, I don't think you can find a state in the union that doesn't have some person of Japanese ancestry. Idaho wouldn't have as many Japanese Americans as they do now because there were a lot of people went out there to work and then settled down, went to work first, and then bought farms, and went into business. This is true in Wyoming, it's true in Montana, it's true in Nevada. So it was, it would be better to have Japanese Americans all over the States than to have it concentrated in Oregon, Washington, and California, like it used to be before the war, because they know more about you. Now, another war -- if Japan would start a war like the same way they did then -- being Japanese Americans all over the United States, there wouldn't be that much problem because more people know about us, and know of us, and know what we do, and what we are. At that time in 1941, just the three states, you might say, there was hardly any people inland from those three states. So the public feared us most because there was so many concentrated in one small area. It was a little easier to watch, and it was easier to move us out of there, but today I think through the publicity, through JACL, the public knows enough that they don't have to worry.

<End Segment 34> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.