<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Well, so at some point, not too long after you got to Heart Mountain, they distributed, it was called a leave clearance, but a lot of people think of it as a "loyalty questionnaire."

HN: Yeah, a "loyalty questionnaire."

TI: Do you remember when that happened?

HN: Yeah, I remember that.

TI: So talk about that.

HN: It was an uproar in the camp because of the so-called "loyalty questions," and that's when my father, normally a quiet guy, he was very upset. And that was the first time that he expressed his emotion. "Why is this question posed to us now? Why wasn't this posed to us before the evacuation?" And that was the time he drew his line in the sand, and he said, "No more," and that's when he applied for repatriation to Japan. If it wasn't for that I don't think he would have applied for repatriation. And also he talked to my older brother -- he was by then seventeen or eighteen -- and told my brother, "It's up to you." But my father was telling him, "From the way my perspective is, when you go into the army, volunteer for the army, you got to realize you're gonna probably die." And in order to die for their country, you had to have some kind of... you know, feeling towards the country, affection towards the country, and how can you have affection towards a country when they treated you this way? And that's the point in our experience that we changed completely.

TI: So it was when this questionnaire came out it really pushed, it sounds like it really, it was like the straw that broke the camel's back for your father.

HN: Yes.

TI: Up to this point, you mentioned he was quiet, didn't really talk about this, but it was like when this came out, it just pushed him over the edge, that he said no more in some ways. And you mentioned, so he drew a line. Did he physically draw a line?

HN: No, no, he says, "This is it," you know.

TI: And do you remember where he had this conversation with your brother?

HN: Well, he had... the quarter we were living in is just the one room, separated by a little partition we made, you know, the beds, so when they, we were talking it was a family discussion.

TI: And so it was more than just your father talking to your older brother, you were there, too?

HN: Yeah, we were there, too. Of course, my younger brother don't know what we were talking about because he was only about six, seven years old.

TI: And I'm guessing that when you talk about your father being sort of a mild-mannered man, for him to be so upset, it really had an impact on you and the others.

HN: Oh, yes. Naive as we were, we knew it.

TI: Do you remember if your mother was there and her reaction?

HN: Well, it's the same thing. My mother says, says, "Why should you give your life to a country that didn't treat you justly?"

TI: And so was your brother of age that he had to fill out this questionnaire, too?

HN: Yeah, he must have been seventeen or eighteen years old.

TI: So you were still young enough where you didn't have to?

HN: Yeah. I was just, I think, sixteen at the time.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.