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TI: Well, so I'm curious; with Ike, Ike was incarcerated during World War II. Did he ever share that with you?

CS: No.

TI: And so when did you find out that this had happened to Japanese Americans?

CS: Oh... [pauses] you know, I can't, I can't remember how it was that I learned it, and I didn't learn it... I think I learned it from reading, but I became aware of the fact that there was a dichotomy between the Chinese Americans and the Japanese Americans, and some unstated and sometimes stated antagonism between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans in Seattle. And I remember seeing photographs of shops run by Chinese Americans that said, "We're not Japanese," and that kind of thing. And somehow or the other, my curiosity about that came into focus around 1952. And the, with respect to the incarceration experience... you know, I really don't know. I don't know when I first became intentionally aware. But when the commission report came out, it was not news to me, because I already knew all those things. When I was president of the American Baptist Churches, for example, I got our general board to pass a resolution condemning the incarceration. So that was some years later, in the '70s, but I just don't know. But it -- and this is not a true answer, but it seems that I always knew it. But the question is, when did I know it, and I could never under oath say, "I became aware of it at this time," or, "I became aware of it through this process."

TI: How about just recollections? Because you're well-known in the Japanese American community with people like Ike and others, at points did people just sort of share their stories of what, what happened to them? Or did they avoid telling you? I'm curious, sort of, because you're, you're outside the Japanese American community, and I'm just curious how people within the community communicated what happened to outsiders.

CS: In the Nikkei culture, you may be aware, there is a reticence to talk about unpleasant experiences. And while I was on the board of the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League for a number of years, I never... I do not remember ever hearing persons talking about the incarceration experience until we got into redress, which was opening another chapter. So I was aware of, for example, Reverend Emery Andrews, who was the non-Japanese minister of the Japanese Baptist Church, who was dearly loved by the Nikkei community in Seattle, because among other things, he would make weekly trips to Minidoka to stay in touch with his friends and parishioners, and other residents of Seattle who were in that concentration camp. And so I began to get little bits of information through that process, to the point at which I would be nervy enough to ask my Nikkei friends, "Were you in a concentration camp? Which one?" And I was able to identify all the camps. I knew where they were located and all of these other things. And it all came into focus, however, when the Commission on Wartime Relocation issued its report, which is a comprehensive report on the relocation experience. But again, I learned through the testimony before the commission -- I was not on the commission, but I attended all the hearings here in Seattle -- I learned of experiences that some of my friends had had for the first time in those hearings. And later on, of course, when we got involved in the redress movement, everything came into focus and that was the beginning of my intense knowledge of what actually happened. And we had what was called Days of Remembrance, the first time at the staging grounds in Puyallup, that was where the logo with the barbed wire was first used.

TI: Right, that's the Frank Fujii...

CS: Frank Fujii did it.

TI: Did that one.

CS: Right, and I am the proud owner of an original copy of that. [Laughs] It's a print, but it's, it's a framed print. But I attended and participated in the first Days of Remembrance at Puyallup. And so these things began to churn inside, intellectually and emotionally, to the point at which you began to look into it and see what actually happened and how a government could do such terrible things to a part of its population, and the idea of literally imprisoning. And whatever euphemism they may use, "internment camps," I call them "concentration camps," and they were imprisoned and the staging grounds, stables, fairgrounds and stables, things like that, throughout the area, and how they applied the law simply by a person's appearance, by the name that they had, and with nothing, nothing more than that. And not every person of Japanese ancestry was in the prison camps. I have friends who went to Chicago, for example, and people living in Chicago were not in the camps. But again, all of this is to say that as you put together little bits of conversations, and little bits of reading, and you begin to determine what actually happened, I think Michi Weglyn's book, (Years) of Infamy, was probably the most intense reading experience I had about the incarceration experience. And when you put all the things that have been written together, you get a pretty good idea of what actually happened, and then when you reach the stage where I am, where you have no hesitancy to ask one of your friends what their experience was, and you get their reaction to their experience, then you know that this is not a figment of someone's imagination. You know that this actually happened. And so some of this information I learned through my affiliation with the Japanese American Citizens League, but not all of it. It was just a platform where we had common goals and common interests, but it was not a platform on which people were able to express their rage and anger over the experience they had had.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.