<Begin Segment 7>

AI: Well, I'm interested... you just mentioned that some of your early discussions, your early assignments before you had any textbooks and so forth were about the issues of the evacuation and the relocation. And I'm wondering, what was the nature of some of those talks? What kinds of things did -- I imagine some of the students must have gone through some difficult times.

HM: Well, one of the first assignments that I gave, really to get acquainted with my students, was for a biographical sketch of each one. And that began to open my eyes, and I remember especially, one boy who said that it was as though on December 7th, they had lowered a basket over his head. And he'd been in that kind of a fog ever since. And then I was reminded by a former student recently that I had decided we would have a debate on the justification for the evacuation. And I planned, well, we'll divide the class into teams, have a debate, one side would be pro-evacuation and the other, con-. Not a fellow or girl in my class was willing to take the pro- side of evacuation, except for this one kid. And he was an exceptional fellow, very independent-minded. And his brother had been collecting information, and so he had practically a whole resource library at his disposal. And he agreed to take on the whole class. So it was this one student against the rest of the class. And so we heard both sides of the evacuation story, but I was interested that even for discussion purposes, no student wanted to venture to be in favor.

AI: Well, I'd like to go back a little ways and -- to the point before you actually started classes. And I'm wondering what your own thinking was on the justification of this relocation issue.

HM: Well, it was very interesting... I guess I hadn't really thought it through that much. My aunt, who was the social worker, was living in Carmel at the time, and she was a social worker, and had a colleague who was in the assembly center down in Monterey County, and she had been to visit her, and she knew more about the relocation program than I did. So she clued me in a lot, so I don't think I'd ever confronted the issue head-on. But when we started the workshop of the faculty and the cadet teachers, the Nisei, who were to be assistant teachers, was the day they started blasting for the foundations of the watchtowers. Well, those dynamite blasts just reverberated through the building, and of course, it just underscored the humiliation of the cadet teachers. And we could see they were quite upset. Finally they asked us, "Well, what do you think about relocation, the evacuation?" And when the teachers said, "Well, we don't think they should have taken the American citizens," the tension was broken, and we could turn then to discussing education. So that was my first real confrontation of it.

AI: That must have been quite a moment, to really be confronting the idea that the government had taken this action against American citizens, and that as a group of teachers, you were stating that in your opinion, that had been mistaken on the part of the government.

HM: Right, right. But I have to say, we were confronted with such an adjustment, new things happening all our waking hours, so that there was almost more than we could reflect on. And it sort of grew on me, and as I learned more about the experiences prior to the actual evacuation, and, for instance, I knew a young college student and his sister who relocated very early, and through them, and through their conversations with my parents whom they visited in New Jersey, I learned how, after the evacuation orders, people would come up to their home and, "Well, I'll give you five dollars for your refrigerator," and they just seemed to feel that a Japanese family was fair picking. And then I learned about how people had to dispose of their goods, could only bring what they could carry in a suitcase, and the whole picture began to unfold. But it didn't come all at once. And I'm still learning.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.