<Begin Segment 25>

TI: Because soon after, you, we mentioned Tule Lake, and so you go from Jerome, the family goes from Jerome to Tule Lake. And some of the reasons people went to Tule Lake was either how they answered the "loyalty questionnaire" or their desire to be sent back to Japan. So in your case, why did, why did the family go to Tule Lake?

MK: He was a "no-no," and he wanted to go back to Japan. Both. He was so bitter that he said no matter what, he's going back to Japan. Said he's not gonna stay in a country that imprisoned him for nothing. Said he's not going to stay in a place where his friend gets shot down. I don't know where. A prisoner got shot someplace. You know, in the internment camps.

TI: Well at Fort Sill, Oklahoma --

MK: Fort someplace.

TI: -- there was, there was a...

MK: The guy that...

TI: Was climbing the fence.

MK: Yeah, the climbing fence.

TI: So that was Mr. Oshima.

MK: And the bitter method, he said the way that they allowed, they let him go until they finally shot him without a -- they let him go through so much space and it was deliberately getting to a point where he had, they could shoot him. So he says, "If that the kind of country that we are living, I don't want to live in this country."

TI: And so does your father tell you that, or did he share that, or you heard him talking about that?

MK: He talked about that several times, but he never would distinct where he was talking about, and I really didn't want to hear it. That was another thing. I didn't want to hear this, with the atrocities that happened at his camps. Like he talked about being in Livingston and in the swamp and pushing logs around for the sake of pushing logs around. And the military would make him move things around in the swamp.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.