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Title: Elaine Ishikawa Hayes Interview III
Narrator: Elaine Ishikawa Hayes
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 24, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-helaine-03-0019

<Begin Segment 19>

AI: [Laughs] I'm (going to) ask you to kind of come up a little bit more quickly now about another issue, because I can see that you, you went through many, many different things in the Public Health arena, and I'm sure there are many other things you could tell us there, but I wanted to kind of redirect another area, because another thing that was happening in the late '70s and into the '80s was redress for Japanese Americans. And I was wondering what you thought about this when you first started hearing about it, because I have heard from some other Japanese Americans that when they first heard about the idea of actual payments to Japanese Americans for redress, they weren't so sure that was such a good idea, and they feared possibly a backlash. So I was wondering, do you recall when you first started hearing about this idea and what you thought about it?

EH: I thought that, I thought it was that the government needed to do this, the government needed to do this to make Americans aware, and unless money was involved, Americans weren't going to, to remember it, or it wasn't going to sink in. (Yes), I testified here in '80, I guess early '80s, because I really felt that something, some kind of restitution was necessary.

AI: How did you get involved in that, in getting to the point where you actually decided to testify at the Commission hearing?

EH: Well, I just figured that not only was it wrong, but I thought the country and the world should be aware that this kind of thing could happen. And, to me, it was racially motivated, though I remember in camp, when I was doing the recreation work, I used to feel like -- and I was maybe naive to think that if we had lived in an integrated environment, if we had been scattered through the neighborhood and cities, that this might not have happened. And I think I wasn't aware in those days so much about, of red-lining, or how discriminatory the world really was. I think I was comfortable living in a Japanese community; I wasn't in Japantown exactly, but our friends were all Japanese and you were accepted. I think I had a few, a Chicano friend that I used to walk up, walk to school with sometimes, there was a black gal, bright, black gal, Leona Henderson next door to me, and a Mexican family. But there were never, the only whites you got acquainted with was kids at school. But you didn't always socialize with them; we had fun talking about, they would tell us about their dances and who wore what, but it was never socializing.

I do remember that in my senior year, there was a picture in the paper, in the society page of the Sacramento Bee, there was a picture of a classmate of mine, and it named her parents. And her father happened to be the head of the insurance company that my, my parents had to go downtown, and so knew him quite, quite well. And my father was kind of delighted to see that picture, and I said, "Oh, (yes), I know her. She's in my math class," or something. And later, he, Thanksgiving time, he says, "Can we invite Mr. So-and-so for Thanksgiving dinner?" Apparently he was divorced and he didn't go to family dinners. And I guess my reaction, and maybe typically, I just didn't think we were an appropriate, that we didn't have the niceties and the finery that Mr. Butler should come to. And I regret that, because I think it would have been a good experience for all of us, but knowing his daughter in school and all, I just wasn't willing to... and that's one of those ironic things that I wish, I wish I had been more aware. But integration to that extent wasn't, we weren't that much into pushing that.

AI: So your, your awareness of the kinds of discrimination and the causes of segregated neighborhoods before World War II, your awareness was quite different and less than, than it was by time the redress hearings were happening.

EH: (Yes), you know, that was, early '80s, my kids would have been in their teens or college years by then.

AI: I think it was 1981 that there was a hearing here, in 1980, '81 across the country.

EH: Uh-huh. And we were beginning to read a lot about it. I just felt that if the, if we didn't force the government to do something about it, it was not going to be remembered or meaningful. Just a thank you, a thank-you letter, I knew wasn't (going to) stay in the history books. And I felt, it's kind of interesting the redress, the committee came up with addressing the economic factors, the family solidarity factors, health factors, and mental health problems. So I, I chose to talk about the economic costs on my mother, particularly. Did I give you a copy?

AI: Yes, right.

EH: Okay.

AI: Yes, so we do have a copy of the testimony that you gave.

EH: I, the, I'm waiting for somebody to come out with a readable compilation of those testimonies, because the stories of every one of those people -- this was at what's now the Broadway theater building -- was so significant. Every story was so meaningful, even from Alaska and, and that's when we heard for the first time about the Aleuts and what happened to them. It's the first time, if you didn't grow up here, you weren't aware of Walter Woodward, the Bainbridge Island journalist. He, he testified at the Seattle hearing, and that was... you really felt gratitude.

AI: Were you, in listening to the hearings, the testimonies at the hearing, were you surprised at how outspoken some of the people were about their experiences?

EH: I don't think... you know, I don't think it's outspokenness. I think it's just presenting the facts and telling it like it was. I mean, most of us, there were people who were younger than I was, and as children, they're witnessing their parents, their fathers being taken off to who knows where. The kinds of things that women had to cope with when the, when the men were, the leadership-caliber people, men were taken off, gee, what were the women supposed to do? They didn't understand English, they didn't know enough about the business, but what a horrendous trauma that must have been.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.