<Begin Segment 16>

TI: And so how did your, your parents and your brother answer the "loyalty question"?

HN: It was "no-no." He says, "You know, I could say 'yes' and put a condition. No, I said, let's make it either black or white, and I said, 'No-no.'"

TI: Okay, so "no-no." And when your father and brother did this, was it with the thinking that --

HN: My mother, too.

TI: -- and your mother. Was it with the thinking that, that they would want to go to Japan?

HN: My father, yeah. He says he, as I was saying, he was from a family that was passed on a lot of the asset onto the, it's a heritage thing, so he, as the oldest... he was the oldest son of the family, so he inherited property, house, some farming land and some orange groves up in the mountains, so he was...

TI: So he knew there was something in Japan for him.

HN: Yeah, he was, he knew something was in Japan. Where, on the other side of the coin, he didn't have anything in the U.S. It was all taken away.

TI: But how is that for, like, you and your brother, because all you really knew was the United States, and, although there might have been land in Japan, you knew the United States, but not Japan. How did you feel about going to Japan?

HN: At the time, how do I... gonna feel in Japan? Now, those things never came to my mind. I knew, I was just thinking that issue, whether my father was reasonable, in my naive thinking, and I said yeah, they threw us in this camp and took everything away, and I said, "I wouldn't blame my dad for getting mad."

TI: And when your dad was explaining all this to you, this talk, was he speaking in Japanese or English?

HN: Japanese.

TI: Okay, so your Japanese was good enough so you could understand what he was saying and all that. So when you... Hank, a few minutes ago, when you first told me about this, you got pretty emotional talking about your dad doing this. Tell me why. What's the...

HN: My emotion?

TI: Yeah, about your father and, and his anger, I think, about this.

HN: Yeah. Well, the audacity of the government, you know, to ask questions like that to the people they had incarcerated. That's an insult. Even now I feel that way.

TI: And it's, just strikes me, I mean, this is something that happened almost seventy years ago, and how powerful this still is for you and others when you think back to this. And it's almost, what I'm sensing, was it was more, like you say, the audacity. It's not so much even the physical hardships that you suffered, it was what the government did, or the distrust and then sort of putting it into your face that, that...

HN: Yeah. And the questionnaire was death or life type of question, will you volunteer and go to combat.

TI: And you mentioned how, if it weren't for the questionnaire, your father wouldn't have reacted this way?

HN: No, I don't think so.

TI: In the same way, how about you and your brother, how do you think that would have... if they didn't do the questionnaire, you stayed at Heart Mountain, what would have -- and then just released -- how would that have changed, do you think? In terms of your feelings. Do you think that would have been as emotional, or, or...

HN: If we were older?

TI: Yeah, if they didn't do the questionnaire, if the questionnaire didn't come up?

HN: Oh, didn't come up, no. We would have waited out and see how everything would've developed. And that was the position my dad was taking. He says, "Why fight this? It's a, there's no way we could, nothing we could do really. It's between two governments," and that was his thinking, says... but when the government start intruding into the life of the evacuees, then it's an imposition, you know, that he couldn't take it anymore.

TI: Thank you, for sharing that. This is really powerful. So your parents and your brother answer "no-no" on the "loyalty questionnaire," and the government used those questionnaires to determine, in their own way, what they consider loyal and disloyal, with those deemed disloyal sent to a different place.

HN: Yeah, right.

TI: So can you talk about that?

HN: Well, as you know, the questionnaire came up because the government wanted to screen the people who could, who they could release from the camp to be settled in the other part of the country. So they screened it, they identified who were the resisters, who were in confrontation with the government, so we were classified "disloyal." And we, we got a notice to be shipped to Tule Lake, I guess, a few months later.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.