<Begin Segment 10>

MA: Looking back, I guess, you were born in camp, how do you feel the internment impacted your life?

EH: Made me a better person. [Laughs] I'm going to fight for world peace. My whole life is going to be dedicated for world peace.

MA: But do you feel like it impacted your life?

EH: It had to have.

MA: Or even, like, you know, it obviously impacted your mother and the way that she...

EH: Well, yeah. Well, having had such an impact on my mom had an impact on me. I agree with her. Government think they can buy us back for twenty thousand dollars? It's crazy. You know, what they lost, when you think in terms of monetary value, not even a drop in the bucket. They came home, they found their house totally empty. All appliances gone, all furniture gone, they lost their hundred acres of farmland. I don't know, how can you justify that?

MA: Do you feel like the public in Hawaii is generally aware of what happened?

EH: No, because they weren't impacted as such. Sure, they did send some people to Honouliuli, there's no doubt about it. But in all fairness to the people in Hawaii, too, if they locked up everybody, Hawaii would have died. They ran the bakeries, they ran the stores, they ran the distribution, they ran the, you know, the Japanese were involved with construction, Japanese were involved with everything. So if they locked up all the Japanese in Hawaii, the state would have died. And I think that was one of the considerations why they did it. And they felt -- I'm just guessing -- they felt that Hawaii, being an island state, was easy to monitor and control. But yeah, if they did to the Japanese in Hawaii what they did on the mainland, they would have regretted it to this day.

MA: Do people... do you think people are generally aware of, like, the mainland internment story?

EH: No, because they never were exposed to it. Which is one reason why I agreed to do this for you. Because although they were not exposed to it, they still gotta know about it. It's a big deal, man. You know, when I run into people and they say, "What? You mean people were locked up during the war?" "You didn't know?" "Oh, my, that's terrible." This person's a schoolteacher. I wanted to, "Wake up, girl."

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.