<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Now later on, after Tule Lake was a segregation camp, so this is a little bit later on, there started to be activities, in terms of, I won't say martial arts, but exercise...

HN: Hoshidan, you're talking about.

TI: Hoshidan, for young men it'd be Seinendan, and so do you recall those activities?

HN: Yeah, I joined at my, my father made us join that because we were going to Japan, and then for us to go to Japan as we were, we're gonna have a lot of problems, not knowing what's the custom of Japan is and so forth. So that was the primary reason my dad told us that we should join the Hoshidan, to become familiar with the culture and custom and so forth.

TI: So how would they do that? What kind of things would they teach you?

HN: Well, in the morning, we used to get up, have callisthenic exercise and then do the marching, as putting the band around, we didn't know why had to put that on there, but they wanted to show the unity of the movements. And looking back now, the reason why, I feel, maybe was not expressed at the time, but it was, I feel, a... organized confrontational symbol that those people wanted to express against the U.S. government. I think that was the main unspoken objective by the movement. Until then it was each individual person confronting the government and so forth, but there were no organized confrontation, expression of unsatisfaction. So I feel, that's the way I look at it, talking to some of these, when I was in Japan, talking to some of these older guys, 'cause we had to express, we had to, at the time, express our dissatisfaction and the injustice, and so that was one way of showing the organized expression. And that's the way I look at it. Not at the time. That was we were all trying to get accustomed to Japanese way.

TI: Now, and so these organized activities, did the camp administration or any of the guards ever react to some of the things you were doing?

HN: Not that I know of. Seeing how I was still in my teen, minor if you're under eighteen, you were, I was a follower, not the organizer, but I didn't see any, except that they kept a close eye on us when we were exercising and so forth. There were always a patrol guard somewhere out in the distance, keeping an eye on us.

TI: So they, the guards were always watching when you were outside.

HN: Yeah, always watching.

TI: You mentioned, during the break we talked about your father. He was mild mannered, but that he became a little more outspoken, so tell me about that. How did he become more outspoken?

HN: Outspoken in the sense that he wanted us to learn the, like joining the Hoshidan to accustom ourselves to, to the Japanese way of living, so that we were prepared, we would be prepared to go to Japan. And, like, expressing the fact that we were called disloyal and troublemaker, and he was expressing to us, "No, we're not the troublemaker. They are. The government is." He never said, spoke that way before.

TI: Did he talk more about Japan to you and your brother, about what Japan was like?

HN: Now, see, when we, I was four years old during the Great Depression in 19...

TI: 1929, 1930, '31...

HN: 1930, somewhere around there. We were in Japan. My father decided, "Why try to stay in business when nothing, we can't even do anything? Let's go to Japan, stay there for a while. When the economy start recovering we'll come back again." So he, we still had friends in the U.S., so we went to Japan sometime during the period, and when the economy or the fishing industry start picking up he came back. So we stayed in Japan for a little over a year, maybe a year and a half, when I was about four years old. And I remember going to kindergarten in Japan. It was, so I was in Japan before being expatriated.

TI: So you knew a little bit about, you remember a little bit...

HN: Yeah, I remember a little bit about it. My grandmother and so forth.

TI: Okay, good.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.