<Begin Segment 20>

MA: And tell me about your... 'cause I know that you go to a lot of reunions and pilgrimages, and you're very active with JANM. If you could talk about that and what that means to you, your volunteer work with the community.

JH: I think the main reason I went was because my sister, who was my father's executor, decided that his pictures would be better up here. And so she gave the notebooks to Pam Funai, who used to work at the museum. So when Pam first came up, she brought those, and we donated it. Then I decided since my letters might deteriorate, 'cause he had 'em in these large folders, I donated that to the museum. Then my son copied the self-published autobiography that my father wrote, which is at the museum. Well, I put that in my son's name, because he had copied it. I mean, that book is that thick, and it has not been edited, it's exactly the way he wrote it, he typed it out. So there's a lot of repetition in there, but you get the gist of the story. So I gave them a copy, but I did not want to give them the original one, because he had leather covers put on that. So they have it in HNRC there.

MA: So your father's artwork really brought you to all of this.

JH: That brought me, yeah. And then discovering that nobody seemed to know that people from Hawaii were in camp. That was another reason. And what really urged me on was this woman who writes a column for the Daily Breeze, our newspaper. And one, she had written in there, years ago, that this man, who went to one of the camps, who was about my age, would go from school to school and he would recount his time in the internment camps. But he always said, "Nobody from Hawaii ever went in." And you know, I decided, "Hey, somebody has to tell the story about people from Hawaii." So this is why I've been active in the museum and participated in their panels. So there were two panels I really did participate in, the first one being the one at the... I can never remember the name of the, Bonaventure, the round hotels, anyway, in town. We had the all-camp reunion there, thing. So I was on a panel with Dennis Ogawa from Hawaii, professor. I remember sitting there thinking, "They told me there would be two others recounting the internment camp things." So I turned to Dennis, who was teaching in Hawaii, he's from... I don't know what's... from here, anyway, mainland. So I turned to him before we started and I said, "What am I gonna do? I hope your speech is long." 'Cause he gave the historical background about people going, everything that's historical. And then he finished and I went, "Oh my god, what am I gonna do?" So I'm looking around the room, pinpointed my friends, pinpointed the volunteers. But the Kirita sisters were sitting in front, and they went to camp with us, so I decided I'll speak to them. So the advice Dennis gave me was, "June, talk story." Because that's what they do in Hawaii, they say, "talk story," meaning, "tell stories about what happened," or your memories or anything. So I said, "Okay," so I "talked story." And I guess I must have filled that whole thing. I think I spoke for, I don't know how long, hour, longer than that. 'Cause Dennis didn't speak very long. But I did speak to the Kirita sisters and looked at some of the volunteers. 'Cause I was amazed to see who was sitting in there.

MA: Well, I think it's great that you've done so much work to really educated the public about the experience of Japanese...

JH: I want them to know because my parents went through so much. And as much as Hawaii is not supposed to be discriminatory, when we got back, we had that stigma. So a lot of the people that I knew who had been in camp, we kind of stuck together in school. But as the years went on, people forgot about it. Then they started saying, "Now, we have to let everybody know that people were interned and how they felt." So as it got more publicity, I think more of the people that were taken from the West Coast started speaking out. After my mother had died, my father met a woman in Honolulu from the Yashima family. So her sister is married to, was married to this man who lives in Madera, which is twenty miles above Fresno, if you know where Fresno is. Well, when I met him, he was the nicest man. So I used to call him Uncle Sunny, 'cause his name is S-U-N-N-Y. Then I talked to him about camp, and I asked him, "Where did you go to camp?" And he says, "I was in Jerome." I said, "Wow, I was there, too." So there was a connection there, it was really interesting. But he died, 'cause he was in his '80s, he died maybe about four years ago.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.