<Begin Segment 50>

TI: Can I shift gears here a little bit?

CO: Oh, yes, I'm sorry.

TI: Let's shift, and I actually want to go to your, your book. And Tom, why don't you hold your, your book up.

TA: Oh, this is Betrayed Trust.

TI: Upside down, and just off to the side, and pointing towards me. Good. But I just wanted to -- recently, and this is just... oh, a month or so out, you came out with a book about not only your life, but your, the life of your father. And I just wanted to ask you the question, is why did you decide to write this book? And you could put the book down now.

TA: Well, several reasons. You know, after I retired, I started to reflect. I guess that's when you have time to reflect, and I, I thought about my father and how I kind of betrayed him, betrayed his love, and I says, "Well, what I'm going to do is I'll write about my father." And as a, sort of a... whatyoucallit, a memory for, is it what they call heritage? Or, what it is, a gift to my children and my grandchildren.

TI: Like leaving a legacy?

TA: Legacy, so that they could understand their grandfather, because they haven't met him. They haven't really met him, so I felt that that was, would be a good token to let the children know more about their father. That was one thing, and then, of course, as I started to write this thing, there were certain gaps. And particularly, the gap when he left for Santa Fe, and I wasn't there to observe, I didn't know what he did. So...

TI: Well, so, yeah, so I wanted to just mention how, to write the book, it's not only your life, but your father's life, and you had to do a lot of research to, to sort of map that, or piece it all together. Before you start talking about this, I'm just curious, how long have you been working on this book?

TA: I... about eighteen years.

TI: Eighteen years?

TA: Yeah. Eighteen years. It was a very difficult task to gain all the information I needed to gain.

TI: Because what type of research did you do in those eighteen years, to write this?

TA: Well, I started first talking to relatives, talking to people, trying to find out more about my father. Things that I know, try to confirm what I know, what my mother told me, and see if that was accurate. Talked to my uncles, I talked to friends of his, and then I, going to, I started to go to the Bancroft Library, and I started to research at the National Archives. Because of the fact that as I went along, there's gaps that, that, there's information that I didn't know. For example, what's contained in the FBI file, or the intelligence file? I don't know what's in it. Then what happened, he told me what happened when he was picked up, but I have nothing to, to support that. So I started to try to search for his file, really, initially, and it all turned out negative. It seemed that every time I send a letter to the State Department or the FBI, or National Archives, or, you know, the army archives, I get a negative. WRA files and, and it always comes back. Well, I don't say purely negative, because I, I found some FBI reports, his, his personal file. Files that were maintained during his evacuation days, Topaz, I mean, in Tule Lake, all those kinds of stuff were, were dribbled in. "Oh, yeah, we found this." And then you write to somebody else and they says, "Oh, yes." And so I started getting more and more information.

TI: Do you want to speculate on why some of his files were unavailable or missing? That you couldn't find?

TA: Well, at first, I just thought there was just... being in intelligence, I says, "Oh, God." I mean, either one is, they, they have the file, but it's lost, or they don't want to give it to me. And then, of course, I had to rely, Freedom of Information Act, I had to rely on the Freedom of Information Act, even to get it. In fact, they told me that I cannot ask for it, it had to be my older brother. I says, "Well, wait. My brother's in Japan and I'm here. And he, I'm, I'm his surviving son." And so I guess that was enough argument that they, they released me some of his private files. But somewhere, some-, I think that there's a file that exists that I, I haven't been given to me, or either destroyed for some reason or another.

CO: Or still... what's, can't, can't be opened until 2030 or something like that.

TA: It may be because there are a lot of names. You know, that's something that I, I got involved in, is names, people's names. They will give me my file, my father's file, but if it contains any other names in there, they will either block it out, or they'll cut it out, or they would never give it to me because of the fact that it had other people's names. That could be it. I mean, it could be that there's a lot of names that they don't want to reveal because that's one of the things that the intelligence agencies do protect. And not only that, they protect methods and sources, and if there are, quote, "informants," or people that have provided information, they would, of course, give them coded names, but they won't release that.

<End Segment 50> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.