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TI: Within the community growing up, how were the camps discussed with either your parents or amongst peers, or amongst other people in the community?

DM: You know, until the redress struggle started, they weren't discussed at all. I mean, I, it's a simple answer to that question. Almost never. It would come up in the context of, "Oh, that's George Furukawa. We knew him from camps." Or, "Oh yeah, we met them in Santa Anita when we were at the racetrack, camps." But you never heard 'em talk about conditions. Just rarely would they advert to or refer to an instance that happened, an incident that happened in camp, almost never negatively. I know, I think they just wanted to forget. They felt shamed. It was a traditional kind of psychology that Japanese Americans went through. With a typical psychology. So we didn't talk about it at all.

TI: So what happened when you first started learning about those, perhaps in school or your own research? When did that happen?

DM: In high -- I remember we always were aware of the shadow of the camps in the back, that they had gone somewhere sometime and were taken away by the government. But we were young at that time and our lives revolved around sports and school and so it wasn't -- and theirs was about making a living and surviving. So there was no need to discuss that -- or not, not a need, people didn't discuss it. I learned about it, some parts of it from them, I learned parts of it in school, there were a couple of paragraphs in history books and that's about all there was in high school. And in college I learned a little bit more about it. And it went, I guess when I really started questioning it was when the Civil Rights movement started going in full bloom and there were demonstrations in the South and that carried over to more demonstrations, calls for sit-ins and equality. And that gave rise to the real, to the notion of ethnic identity. And in 1967, groups of Asian Americans -- and led mostly by Japanese Americans, because they were more Americanized at the time, and mostly at UCLA -- started discussing the issue of the camps and identity. And I remember bringing that up to my folks and they would give me bits and pieces of information but they really didn't want to talk about it.

So we really didn't talk about it until probably, let's see, I went to law school in the '70s. I started getting more interested in it then 'cause I read the Korematsu case. I read the Hirabayashi case in law school in 1969 and after that I started asking them a little more, and they told me a little more. I started looking at the photographs. And they told me a little bit about them. And I remember probably in the mid- to late-'70s when -- no, excuse me, the mid-'70s, I, in the early '70s I hooked up with a group called the Bay Area JACL and our leader was a man named Edison Uno. He was the president of our organ-, of our little JACL chapter. It was a crazy little chapter. They did all kinds of wild things, and one of 'em was to ask for redress. That was in 1972. He actually did it in 1970 but he came to the 9th national convention in 1972 and demanded redress. And about that time I started asking my mother and my father. They talked a little more but I remember one, really clearly at one point, I said, "What was it like, Mom? What was it like to be in the camps?" I said, "Where did you go?" And she went to Santa Anita. And she was telling me about how when she got there with her younger sister. There was horse stalls. There was hay on the ground. There was dirt. There was horse shit on the walls. It smelled terrible. There was one light. There was no place to sleep, no place to go to the bathroom. And she started crying. And it's the first time I ever saw her, started tearing. She goes, "I guess it was pretty bad." And then she didn't want to talk about it too much because she goes, "I don't want to talk about it right now." But I'd never seen her reflect or have that kind of emotional reaction ever before. And that was in the early '70s when the redress movement first started.

TI: And so how did that make you feel when you saw your mother tear up like that?

DM: Wow. Then I realized, wow this was something. I mean, this was -- you could read about stuff in a book, but when your own mother, who's really tough, and you know, hardly ever complains about anything, mentioned that -- and the way she's phrased it, 'cause she was kind of protective of her little sister. And her sister started to cry when she was in, she saw it in the camps, too. And so, she saw those conditions. So I felt that, wow this is, this is a bigger issue than I really understood it to be, both from an intellectual point of view or an emotional point of view. And so I started listening more to what Edison was saying. And then in 1974 I came up to Seattle. Maybe that was the first or second time I came up to Seattle to the Seattle convention here. Was it in Seattle or Portland? No, I think it was in Seattle. And we brought the issue of redress again to the floor and the idea was, was accepted, of course, but there was nothing that was pursued very much.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.