Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Jim M. Tanimoto Interview
Narrator: Jim M. Tanimoto
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary); Barbara Takei (secondary)
Location: Gridley, California
Date: December 10, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-tjim-01-0030

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BT: Jim, I just wanted to ask, it was wonderful having you at the pilgrimage in 2009 at the CCC camp. And I'm just wondering what impact that experience had on you.

JT: Well, you know, I don't know if you know that lady... what the heck was her name? Kitajima.

BT: Oh, Molly.

JT: Yeah. Her daughter --

BT: Taiko, yeah.

JT: I spent time in between the busses, and, and I talked to her and I talked to the people that came to listen. And after I got through, even after four hours, I felt different. I felt like something, something was off my back. You know, you don't realize that you're carrying a load until you take it off. And that's just what I felt. I felt like I took the load off my back after I got through talking. I never knew that I had a load on my back, but that's what I felt like.

BT: Yeah, a lot of people say that after coming to a pilgrimage. Is this something that you had shared with your children earlier?

JT: Well, I've taken my kids up there when they were younger. This is the first time they've been up there after they were adults. But they told me after they were there, they listened to one of my talks over there, and they says, "I didn't know that, things that you talked about there, that you never even talked about at home. You never even told us about it." I don't know what it is. My brother, he served in the MIS in the Pacific, and it took him, I don't know, seven, eight years before he could talk about war experience, maybe that was the same thing with me, I don't know. But he could, my brother could talk about the good times he had in the war experience, like when they pushed back the Japanese army and overrun their mess hall. He says he found rice and he found tsukemono and he found umeboshi. He says he really missed that, you know. And things like that he could talk about, but he couldn't talk about shooting and questioning people and all that, but he can talk about the good times that he had during the service. That's exactly how I felt, anyhow. After I got through with my part of that program, it just felt like I got a load off my back. And now I can forget. I don't know about you people, but if you tell the truth, you don't have to remember. But if you tell a lie, you got to remember what lie you told. And you can't tell one lie and then same stories tell a different way. But that was the truth of what happened to me. And like I said, there's many versions of what happened to different people, and this is my version of what happened to me. And so... but some parts that's sort of sixty-some years ago, you can't remember details. And when you're getting to be eighty years old, over eighty, well, that itself is... your mind isn't as active as when you were younger, so all the more reason that you can't remember details.

TI: And Jim, that's why we so appreciate you taking this time. Because for us, this is, we learn so much about... and not so much often the facts, but just these little stories sort of give this whole, you know, this whole story just much more meaning, much more feeling. And again, thank you for taking the time this afternoon.

JT: Oh, no problem, yeah. I'm telling the truth the best way I can, so if you guys can put this out in the public. We don't want the story of what happened to us during the war to go away. It should be history, and it should be in every school, every schoolbook. After the war, I bought a trailer, a fifth-wheel trailer, and we toured some of the National Parks. And one of the parks that we went to was over there in, I think it was in Montana. The place was Custer's Last Stand, and I met an Indian there. He was a full-blooded Indian, he was a great big man. He was probably six-foot-four, six-foot-five, and I don't know. He was selling Indian artifacts, and I don't know where the conversation turned to education, but anyhow, he was telling me, "Yeah," he says, "I got a couple of PhDs and stuff like that." I says -- and he's some kind of engineer, too. And I says, "What are you doing here selling Indian artifacts to the public with the education you have? You got six figure income anytime you want." And he says, "I do have a job." But he says, "My main job, it's not my money, it's I don't want the American public to forget what the Indians went through. And that's why I'm here. I'm talking about what we went through. And the old story about 'a good Indian is a dead Indian,'" he says, "that's not true." So he's, did the same, doing the same thing that I want to do. I don't want people to forget what we went through there.

TI: So thank you so much. Because by sharing this story, you are going to share with lots of people. So thank you.

JT: Well, I hope it makes sense.

BT: Thank you so much. Because the story of protest in Block 42 is really a very little-known story. So thank you.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.