<Begin Segment 18>

MA: So at this point, you said your father was interned in Crystal City, Texas. Had you been able to correspond with him?

IN: Letters.

MA: And did you know how he was doing? And I assume the letters were censored, but could you get a sense of how he was doing there?

IN: At first, he accepted the situation. He, again, was a cook there, from his past experience. But I think all of the internees there got involved with different kind of crafts. And my father, we have one today, an example of that today, made out of dogwood... was it dogwood? No, cotton?

MA: Cottonwood?

IN: Cottonwood root. And you know, they're huge. He made a, sort of like a vase, and we have one, decorated in our home today, this day. But later on, as the war progressed and they realized that the internees were rather harmless, that the possibility of sabotage was really not there, they decided that they would give them a mock trial and release 'em. So my father at that point got very, very impatient. He wanted his turn to come up and it didn't. And we would go to the community manager and say, you know, "Why isn't my father's trial coming up?" There was nothing they could do. So my father, at that point, started to get paranoid, and began thinking in his mind that we were doing it so that he couldn't return. My father was quite a disciplinarian and strict. So he, he got to believe that we didn't want him home, and his letters got very harsh. Then, of course, the date came when he got his mock trial. It wasn't really a trial, there was nothing to try him on. And he came home, but he was never the same. Never the same. And I used to think my father was a Renaissance man, but he became very paranoid, and I don't think he ever got over it. His business, the ranch business that he had built for years, he didn't know what had happened to his ranch. And I guess I don't blame him. I wonder how I would have reacted. You know, after coming from Japan and working his way, then having it all destroyed. But he accused -- and I'll bring this up, 'cause it's for posterity -- he accused my mother of having an affair with a 6-H manager, and it was really terrible.

MA: So you really saw the effect of this internment on him.

IN: It was tragic.

MA: Right. How did that impact you, and I guess the rest of your family?

IN: Oh, it did. I had no comparison of what I would have been like if the war hadn't occurred, and, you know, how it changed me. But I think it did change me to the point where I felt in a quiet way, I had to exert my rights as a U.S. citizen. But I knew I could not do it in a aggressive way, that it had to be in a more subtle way. And I guess in my mind, quietly, it just developed. And to this day, I'm very interested in politics. That's all I watch over TV is politics, and how it will affect, you know, the people.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.