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TI: Yeah, so I want to follow up on that. So you went to a Japanese American church.

DT: Right.

TI: How about Japanese culture? Things like language...

DT: Well, I did go, my parents sent me to Japanese school on Saturdays, but we mainly went there to chase girls and have fun, frankly. It wasn't very serious. And we rejected that; we rejected it anyway.

TI: But there was an attempt by your parents to try to...

DT: There was, but they didn't talk about the internment. I mean, nobody did.

TI: So that's what I wanted to ask. When did that first come up? When did you first, like, start thinking, "Oh, something happened"?

DT: Well, the camps were the singular most defining event in their lives, and so for them, they were proving things. They were always proving who they were.

TI: Right, so for them. But for you, when did it enter your consciousness?

DT: Well, they talk about the camps, but they talk about the good things about the camps and their friends and what they did.

TI: Which block they lived in, things like that.

DT: Yeah. And a lot of social things, but they never talked about... well, "never" is probably not the right word. They did, there was a sense that they were wronged, but their situation was that they had to raise their children, they had to be successful now. The internment had been heard in the United States Supreme Court, the constitutionality of it, the legality of it, and the Court ruled against them. And now they were having his label of basically being "prone to disloyalty," they had to sort of disprove that. So certainly you're not going to get that, you're not going to become that by talking about it and being bitter about it. So they closed that door. And so I had heard about the camps from my childhood, I had read about them in high school by then, and I think there was a psychological overlay that was not articulated in a clear sense, but that has a definite impact. Like, for instance, my father would say to me, "You have to be twice as good as a white man." And I'm thinking as a kid, "Why do I have to be twice as good as a white man? Why can't I just be me?" And then, but the world informs you why. I mean, you turn on the TV set, and you see the images. Like the newscasters were all white men, no women, even. And things that people take for granted as being part of a diverse society didn't exist then. So all the leaders were white, and December 7th was a day I just hated. 'Cause growing up was, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and this was not too many years after World War II ended. We were growing up in the shadow of all of this. And to be identified as being the enemy, or associated with the enemy, or looking like the enemy. That was probably the one day that I would get into fights at school. And so it's a duality. We're trying to blend in, we're trying to be American, but we're not quite, we can't be. And it's like you're growing up as a foreigner in your own country.

So I think, I don't say that to say that I had an unhappy childhood, but it is to say there was a sense of displacement and inequality in the sense that we had to prove ourselves. It would manifest itself in other ways. Now that I look back at it, maybe all these things are psycho-babble. But we would go to, for instance, on car camping trips, where you stay at motels, 'cause we couldn't afford the hotels, or you stay at a cabin. And part of the, when you pay for that, part of the fee is they change the linen, they do all these things, and they clean up after you. And my mother would always save a certain amount of time at the end before we left to clean up the whole place. We'd be scrubbing the sinks and picking up the trash, and I'd say, "Why are we doing this?" Because this is what you pay for. And her, the philosophy was, "You leave the place cleaner than when you found it." And why? Because we don't want people to think badly of us. And I'm thinking -- now, I know where that came from now, and it's this sense of having to flip the stereotype. And so that, all of that sort of baggage, you know, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, it just is what it is. But I think that's where it all comes from. So no, they didn't talk explicitly about the camps in the sense of, "This is what they did to us, this is what happened to us, this is a hardship," all that was never talked about. But all the other things that parents do to protect their children, and to try to make them successful and not be the targets, certainly were passed on.

TI: Okay.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.