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TI: So I want to now go to, kind of like your awakening in a sense. You mentioned high school you started reading about this, so you started reading, sort of, books. It was also, you were talking, what, mid-'60s, late-'60s? I mean, it's kind of a very turbulent time in terms of civil rights.

DT: Yeah, it was a turbulent time. So I was, looking back, I was so lucky to grow up during that period for a lot of reasons. This is postwar, America's having an economic boom, I didn't have to go through the hardships of my father and certainly my grandfather. But at the same time... and America's going through change because of the civil rights movement. So Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, other African Americans leaders at that time were leading marches, and we saw it on our black and white TVs. So even as a kid, you saw the, the newscasters were showing the brutality of what was going on there, you know, with Bull Connor and Mississippi and Alabama and Atlanta and other places. And so we were beginning to wonder about our own place in America, too. There was, I think, a certain amount of identification. Like I feel like, I think, as a kid, there was a sense of, "Yeah, I can kind of relate to that in terms of what it's like to be an outsider," although we understood we weren't African American, but it was a sense of, yeah, we do live in a color-conscious society, and we are not as free to go anywhere as you want to. Although Bay Area was not the segregated South, by any means.

TI: But during this time, did you ever make the connection in terms of what happened to your parents, the fact that they were incarcerated because of their color, their ancestry?

DT: Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's just that we didn't harbor an extreme sense of outrage. It was like, okay, that's the way it is, we can't do anything about it. And so when we saw what was happening with the civil rights movement and things like that, we were thinking, "Maybe there is something you can do about it." And I think it got people kind of politicized and excited. And so, and then all the assassinations that happened, there was Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy, and then a very unpopular war by the time I hit high school, the Vietnam War, in which, very unclear why we're there. And the war, unlike World War II, wasn't measured in cities liberated and territories gained, it was measured by how many, what was the body count. And that kind of announcement of so many people killed, so many soldiers killed every single day as a means of sort of keeping score whether you're winning or losing, was commonplace. That was just an everyday dinner table news thing. And by the time we were in high school, of course, we now had friends who were being drafted out of the war, and some of 'em who were dying. Even, I remember Benji Yamane from our church, kid I played ball with, got into Cal, for whatever reason dropped out, ended up in a ROTC program and then was leading a platoon in Vietnam and he got blown up with a mine. And so as these things were developing, of course, high school students beginning to understand that they had skin in the game. The one thing about the draft is that people realized, "That could be me." And so the war began to be characterized as not only an unjust war, or a war that didn't really have a moral, good moral base to it, but also was seen as kind of a racially, racialized war. And more bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in all of World War II. And so this sense of Asian lives being a little cheap, I think that was also something that also made Japanese Americans and Asian Americans kind of wake up.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.