Densho Digital Archive - Shig Miyaki Interview (denshovh-mshig

<Begin Segment 17>

TI: And so while this was going on, and there were some people who were thinking that maybe this, that the United States was not the country for them, were there any, like, organized sort of meetings or groups to kind of talk about this, the Seinendan or anything like that in Manzanar?

SM: Well, there were people that used to have these meetings. I guess whether you call them educated or, you know... but like for myself, I just went along with what they decided was the thing to do, you know. And it was either pro or con. [Laughs]

TI: And how would you get this information? When you said you kind of listened to these people and they may have been more educated, how did they communicate that to you?

SM: Well, it's just between talks.

TI: So more informally kind of maybe at the mess hall or some other places where you'd run into them and talk about that?

SM: I never sat in on a meeting where these people discussed different things.

TI: But were you aware that some of these meetings were going on?

SM: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. But you know, I can't express myself too good anyway. [Laughs] And to get into a conversation like that, it was out of the question.

TI: And do you have a sense of how people perceived this group that was meeting, in terms of the people talking about them and what they were talking about?

SM: Well, that's why there were some people that resented the groups or whatever, and that's why there were conflicts between the two groups.

TI: And when you say conflicts, can you describe what a conflict would be? Did it ever come to physical altercations?

SM: Oh, yeah, I imagine there were a few physical, that thing, and then especially a lot of the people that were against the authorities there.

TI: And for you, were you ever involved in any, like, altercation, whether it's verbal or physical?

SM: Not that I know of.

TI: I'm guessing they probably stayed away from you because of your judo and everything, too. [Laughs]

SM: No, I pretty much stayed away from all those conflicts. Like even in Manzanar, they had these demonstrations where people got shot at and so forth. But I was never in a group like that, you know. I guess I was just lucky, I guess, I just wasn't the... [laughs].

TI: So earlier we were talking about the group of eight that went up fishing. Of your buddies that you went with, how would you characterize them? Were they on sort of the more pro-Japan side, or the pro-, more U.S. side? How would you describe that group?

SM: I imagine there were different opinions, but we didn't talk about that. This was different from all that stuff.

TI: And so that was kind of like a separate issue. I mean, you had your friends, you did things, and this was kind of more of a individual decision.

SM: Yeah, right.

TI: But do you recall, of those eight, how many of them, in the same way, answered maybe "no-no" to questions 27 and 28 versus "yes-yes"? Can you remember that?

SM: Well, like my brother-in-law and them, they stayed back. So they must have answered it differently from... like my sister was married in camp, and, you know, I don't know what they answered, but they must have answered differently, 'cause they weren't segregated to Tule Lake.