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TI: At Heart Mountain there was a woman, a Caucasian woman who lived at Heart Mountain during the war, Estelle Ishigo, and, and I know about her because there's been books and, and movies, but there was a time when people didn't really know her story. Can you tell me your, your role, your part in helping to get this story told?

BS: Around 1985 or around, in the '80s, the Bureau of Reclamation in Montana contacted me and asked me to find Estelle Ishigo because they wanted to use one of her drawings for the plaque at Heart Mountain. So I asked around Los Angeles and I found Estelle. She was living in a broken down apartment, basement apartment, some of the windows in her room was cracked, broken, she had both of her legs amputated, she was in a wheelchair, she was penniless. She was, she signed over her social security to her landlord. She was getting fed one hot meal a day. She was penniless. Her bed sheet was dirty. She had a hotplate that she would heat Campbell's soup. She had stack of Campbell's soup. So I had a talk with her and I left her a twenty dollar bill; she picked it up and looked at it like she'd never seen money before. So I got home, I got on my computer and wrote everything down, and I sent a copy to Bill Hosokawa, so he sent me twenty dollar and told her, told me to give it to her but don't say who it was from. And so this Estelle needed help. She didn't have any friends. She was sort of, I won't call her a nasty woman, but she didn't have hardly any friends.

TI: On this first visit that you took to her place, what was her reaction when you, when you first got there?

BS: Well, she accepted me. She, she wanted a friend and, well, so we became friends, so I went to see her and she wanted her book republished. She had this book called Lone Heart Mountain that she published, I don't know, some years earlier and was out of print, so she kept pestering me and about getting her book republished and, "We got to tell this story to the whole world of what we went through," and she was so, her feeling was so strong about the injustices of the camp and she was, she was just like a Japanese. So anyway, I got my classmates again and we raised the money to republish her book, and then we put on a fundraiser for her. We put on a small reunion, got friends over and raised some money for her. But then her cat got sick and so we had to spend a lot of money at the vet for the cat, so all the money to the cat. And then this Steven Okazaki, a film producer, found out about her life story, so he wanted whatever I had about her. Well, from Estelle, she had all these original drawings, pencil drawings for her book in this apartment and it was next to this broken window where rain could come through, so I told Estelle, "Hey, let me hold these drawings," so luckily I got those drawings off of her. So anyway, Steven wanted to make a film about her, and I thought, gee, why make a story on this woman, you know, hard to get along with and all that? But that was the story. I didn't realize that. And so I got whatever I had from Estelle and sent it over to Steven and he came up with this story, very good story. I had no part in the, her story, so he came up with this very good story and so in 1990 he won the Academy Award for best documentary.

TI: Yeah, for the film, what, Days of Waiting?

BS: Days of Waiting, right. Turned out to be a powerful story.

TI: And what happened to Estelle Ishigo during this time?

BS: Oh, let's see, well, she was old. She went from convalescent home to another. She, she was a nasty woman. I guess she couldn't get along with the nurses and so forth. At one place, in fact, they, they gave her some, some kind of drug to quiet her down. So, well, she finally got older and I remember I went to see her, she didn't know who I was. And the next day, I think, she passed away, and then I think she passed away before the Academy Award announcement.

TI: Was she able to see the film before she died? Do you know if she saw the film?

BS: No, she did not see it. Oh no, I don't remember that. I don't, I don't remember. I have to check out exactly what happened during that period, but I don't think she saw the film.

TI: And, and after she died, what did you do with, like with her ashes? Do you remember?

BS: Oh yeah, I was just talking to her and I asked her, "You want me to dump your ashes over the Heart Mountain?" She said yeah, so one year I, we had a hike to the top of Heart Mountain and I spread her ashes. Yeah, turned out to be a pretty good gesture.

TI: It's beautiful.

BS: Yeah, that woman. [Laughs] Yeah, she was a part of my life at that, one time. She had no friends, no one to turn to.

TI: But if it weren't for you, her story wouldn't, never have been known, because I think the film did so much.

BS: Right. Now, now that you mention it that way, so I'm glad I did what I did. That was a good story.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.