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WH: So, but anyway, in '45, I became eligible for the draft. I turned eighteen. I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, near Madison, Wisconsin, working on a farm. And I got my draft notice and at the, about the same time, my father was thinking of moving out to Madison. Well, I don't think order's that important. I was living both in, outside of Madison and in Madison at the time. I'm not real clear. I was living with my sister and her husband and her mother-in-law, and they had a baby son. And my father wanted to come out to Madison, and I... he just wrote in Japanese, that was his language. I couldn't write Japanese. Well, it was just impracticable, because Issei simply couldn't get jobs in Madison. So I thought, well, I'll go to Manzanar to visit him, and try to convince him that he shouldn't do that.

The trip to Manzanar was quite eventful, but I won't get into that. But when I got to Manzanar, I was denied admission. They said, "Where's your pass?" And I said, "What pass? What do you need a pass to visit camp?" This is in '45 now, and the exclusion zone had been lifted, and the policy was let everyone out of camp. And I didn't know anything about a pass or anything. So they said, "Well, what do you want to do?" And I said, "Well, visit my parents." And, "Why do you want to visit your parents?" "I want to talk my father out of moving to Madison." And he said, "Well, you can't do that. Our policy is to close the camps." And I had a very emotional experience. I was very frustrated, I was just a kid, I had just turned eighteen. And, but what they did was they wouldn't let me in. And it was partly my fault, but you know, on the scale of things, I think... what they did certainly didn't deserve... it was nothing in what happened to deserve this, but they excluded me from the state of California.

TI: Because of this experience, they excluded you from...

WH: No, they just wanted... they didn't want me to go visit my father so they gave me an individual exclusion order, and ordered me out of the state of California that night. And traveling was not like traveling by plane. It was a multi-day trip. I had traveled by train all the way from Madison to Chicago, and then Chicago all the way to Reno, and then hop on a bus. It had been a long trip and I had a lot -- there was a lot of things that happened to me on the trip -- so I was just really bone tired. I hadn't slept for about thirty-six hours.

TI: But what happened during that meeting that made them decide to do an individual exclusion order?

WH: They did not want me to talk to my parents. It was that simple. And...

GK: But with Endo and everything, how could they do that to you?

WH: Well, that's the thing. The WRA was a bureaucracy that had no control. And so, you know, that's such a vast, sweeping thing to do, such an extreme thing to do, to kick somebody out of the state of California because of some bureaucratic disagreement. Because when I was outside, one of my teachers came to me and he says, "Well, I can get you in as my guest." And I said, "I'm sorry, I've got to get on the next bus." And I tried to talk to the guard, it was a soldier who put me on the next bus. I said, "Well, you know, there is a bus coming a little later that I could catch." Because then I could spend some more times with my friends, they all congregated near the gate and my father came down to the gate, too. And he said, "No, my orders are to put you on the next bus." And that was a terrible experience. I cried, I was crying, you know, and everything else. I think it was probably the last time I cried. No, not... the next to last time I cried in my life. But it was a real, I was just worn out and tired, and slept most of the way back to Wisconsin. No, I didn't sleep most of the time, but I slept quite a bit of the time 'cause I was really tired. But I've never forgotten that. So when I came, when I decided to move out there to California three years ago, I wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Interior. Sort of a funny letter, but I said, "I was excluded from the State of California and I wonder if I could be permitted to move back to California now." [Laughs] Because they don't tell you that the order's been lifted. They give you the exclusion order, but they never tell you it's okay to move back. And that's the way the bureaucracy works. But, things like that, you know, you never forget the rest of your life. So that's really embedded in your, in your gut. And I think that's the kind of thing that motivates people to basically get even.

And I think that, because the one thing that I've learned in my experiences in the civil rights movement, more than civil rights movement, the peace movement, was the government would always do something crazy, like they'd run over people or hoist dogs on people. And they think they were doing something to repress, they did just the opposite. Every time they did something like that, it just galvanized the black community, the civil rights community. Something like that would happen. They did the wrong thing every time. And they would do this over and over again, and it's the same kind of thing. When you do something to someone like that, the person never forgets. You can't forget it, it's just in your gut. So here it comes, you know, I don't know how many years later. And forty years later, and there I am, you know, challenging the government. Well, and then you talk to other people, Nisei, and you find the same thing. I mean, some of the, you know, some of the stories are -- one of the things we did in the redress movement was, which I don't think, well, I don't know how many other people did, but we allowed a lot of time for just talking and consciousness raising. People talk about their experiences and what happened.

TI: And this is during the meeting, when you say a lot of time for talking, this was just a general meeting?

WH: We had, in our meeting, we had meetings every month and we spent about half the time just talking. Somebody would talk about this or that and the other things, and we never shut them up. We just said okay, you want to talk about... because that was part of redress movement. It wasn't just organizing this and organizing that. People tried to do that and I don't think that was... you know, that might have been a model for something else, but it wasn't a good model for the redress movement, not as far as Nisei were concerned, and I don't know about Sansei, because we didn't have Sansei in our movement. We had a couple who drifted in and drifted out. But as far as Nisei were concerned, they had to get things off their chest. There were things they had to talk about and some of them were really, you know, really feeling. I'd just sort of sit there and say, "Oh, wow." Like one woman said when she left camp, she basically separated herself from her parents for a while because she was ashamed to be Japanese. And she was able to admit that to herself, and that's terrible thing to have to admit to yourself. And of course she reconciled that, but the first part of going, leaving camp, that was part of her experience. And so that's a hell of a thing to have to live through, and a hell of a thing to admit. But those are the kinds of things that happened to people. And my sense was that there was a lot of that kind of stuff in the guts of Nisei that we worked with in our movement.

TI: And so your meetings, you spent time just letting them come and talk about them.

WH: Yeah, if somebody wanted to talk about his or that and the other thing, we said, oh, you know.

TI: That's good.

WH: And so I learned a lot about the 442. We had... I think most, I was the only male, Nisei male, who was not a veteran. They were all veterans. We'd talk about their military thing, this or that and the other, if they wanted to talk about it, some of them didn't, some of them did. And it was, everything was interesting, and I think that was, that was a very helpful and important part.

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