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TI: So what happened after you graduated from, from the graduate...

JO: From Columbia?

TI: From Columbia. What did you do?

JO: I, well, I continued to word process. But while I was at Columbia -- and that's when I started, my second year there is when I wrote the first chapter of the novel, which is, I wrote it then as a story, "Evacuation Order No. 19." And so I started writing about the war while I was in school, and I was encouraged, I don't think I would have continued to write about the war unless I'd have been encouraged by my advisor there, Maureen Howard. And it is funny, I think that occasionally in life somebody just gives you a green light, but it's so important. You just need like one "yes" voice, I think, is all you need to hear. But she basically said, "Yes, go ahead."

TI: Well, what was it that she said that made you...

JO: Oh, I think she just said, "I think you should continue writing about this." And it really was something, I just thought, at first I, when I wrote that first story, "Evacuation Order Number 19," it was, it was an aberration for me to write anything, it was the first serious story that I'd ever written and I just thought, "This is odd," you know, "where did this come from?" And I thought I would just write it, get it out my system, put it aside and return to my, to comedy, to writing comedy. But then the next story that I wrote was what is now "Train," the second chapter. So clearly, I mean, I think it was very, I think that book came from a very deep, unconscious place. It's not something that I ever deliberately sat down to write. I just feel like it welled up out of me somehow, and that's when I began doing a lot of research, was when I realized that I didn't, I did want to take the writing of the book seriously and I didn't know enough to tell the story.

TI: So I'm curious about, when you say "research," what kind of research did you do? What books or what documentaries, or what did you do to do research?

JO: I, I read a lot of -- not a lot, 'cause there aren't tons out there, but collections of oral histories, and some memoirs, I read memoirs written by former internees, and then the standard secondary source history books about the internment. I reread my grandfather's letters, I looked at -- oh, Dorothea Lange's photographs that she took for the War Relocation Authority, I looked at some of those. And actually, a friend of my uncle's was looking through her photographs online, and he came across a photo of my grandmother and my mother and my uncle, right after they had arrived at Tanforan. And so, and that was sort of, that was very strange to see.

TI: So this was a photo that Dorothea Lange took of your, of your family?

JO: Uh-huh. And they just arrived, and you can see my grandmother is wearing, she's very well-dressed, she's wearing, like a very nice wool coat, you can tell it's a nice wool coat, and she's talking to about five or six white men in army uniform, and all the men are pointing in one direction. I think they've just arrived. You can see, in the background there's a huge structure, it's a concrete structure, which I think is the grandstand, and they're probably directing my grandmother to the barracks. And her son, my uncle, is carrying her purse underneath his arm like a good boy, and he has just this heartbreaking look on his face, of great concern, and he's looking, he's not worried about where they're going to be sent, he's looking at his mother's face. He's just reading Mom, that's what he's doing, and he knows that she's a little distraught although you can't, you know, she's, she's very Japanese in a way, doesn't show too much. And she's much more Japanese than the woman in the book, by the way. And you can tell he's concerned about her, and then with my mother, all I can see is just the back of her head. She's just got these two black braids wrapped up around her head, but that's all I can see of her. So I looked at photographs, I also looked at some collections of drawings and watercolors, paintings that were done by some of the internees, which since there's not a lot of photographic footage of the camps, since the internees were not allowed to bring in cameras, so... and I'm very interested in what things look like, I think. I have to picture things in my head often before I can begin to write about them. So that's why I really like looking at photographs and then looking at drawings of the camps, too. And then, oh, also, I like reading poems just 'cause I think imagery is just very rich. So I read some poems about the camps.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.