<Begin Segment 51>

TI: Okay, while there's, so there's some information that you weren't able to find, but you were able to piece together other gaps, and one of the gaps was sort of that time he spent in Santa Fe and Fort Stanton.

TA: Yes.

TI: And so let me, let me back up a little bit. So this was that period when, when he was at Tule, and he and sixty-nine other men were essentially arrested and taken out of Tule Lake and brought to a Department of Justice camp at Santa Fe. But you were able to piece together, through interviews and other information, a little bit more information during that period. So why don't you, why don't you tell us about what happened to your father after you left Tule Lake?

TA: Well, after Tule Lake, of course, I had a list of the executive committee members, and so I started to search for these people. Like, for example, Matsuda's wife, Violet, I searched around and got some information from her. Ted Kubota, he was the mimeograph operator for the Hokoku Dan headquarters, and I tracked him down and talked to him about it. I had, at one time, before I started getting real, I started to organize a children of the General Gordon, you know, the people that went back, and these people, there was about twenty other people, talked to them, and some of these people were at Santa Fe. I received information from that. Searching out the archives, I received information pertaining to that. But when it came down to my father and what he did during that period of time, I had to go to Japan. I found out that there were three people that I can maybe get some information. And those information, those names were provided to me by, by Violet. Because one of them was Tokio Yamane. And, and she gave me her address. The Tamura, I was able to get address through Yamane, who had some contacts with them. And then Kenji Wada, Kenji Wada was the one that was very close to him, and through a number of correspondents, checking around, we finally tracked him down, and found him. So those were the three people, and they were all three members of the Central Executive Committee.

TI: So, I'm curious, how did they feel about talking about this? I mean, I image they had not shared this information with very many people, if any, and here you were coming to ask all these questions. I mean, what was, what type of reception did you get?

TA: Sanae Akashi's son. It seemed to have opened the door. Because they says, you know, your accent, you go in there and you aisatsu, you know, and all that, and then you ask 'em what, "Were you in camp?" and things like that. But then as soon as we mentioned that we're the sons of Sanae Akashi, then all of a sudden they opened their heart and they says, "Oh, yeah, Sanae-san." And, and they, they talked to us. And they talked to us about certain things that they never talked before, I guess. 'Cause I don't know what other information was obtained, but told, talked about a lot of the things that he said, one of the, and some of the things that, in his character, what he did. Those, those are the kind of things I, I gained a lot from them.

<End Segment 51> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.