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MN: What other memories do you have of Topaz?

TS: I remember, when I went back in '89 I found our barrack, I found the latrines and the wash house and the mess hall, and I said, I remember distinctly there was a day in the summer when the, a bunch of men, Japanese men in a flat bed truck brought our one and only tree to Block 4, and it was planted right next to the, the northwest corner of our mess hall. And I was standing there and I said, Jesus criminy, there was a tree, we had a tree, right? And there it was, lying on its side, long dead with the branches hanging down, and it looked so sad and it looked so lonely. It died a lonely death after we had gone. And it's still there. But, and camp was so hard. I remember, as a kid, going into our barrack one time in the summer, it was so goddamn hot I had to run out of there. It was unbearable. Can you imagine wearing black in the summer in the desert? And if you ever look at pictures of the barracks, there were no eaves, the eaves of the roof. It was the minimum, maybe twelve inches, so when the sun was directly overhead there was no, there was no shade. And that one tree, I'm sure two hundred fifty people couldn't get under that little tree, so life was hard. And in the winter time it was so goddamn cold. It was thirty degrees below zero, and we didn't have the kind of clothes we have today. We didn't have, we didn't know we were gonna go to a desert. It's, it's unconscionable what they did to us. But somehow we survived. But I have a lot of scars inside, you know. Doesn't show on the outside, but I have a lot of scars inside. When you, when you grow up like that, hating yourself for being Japanese, it's not a pretty picture. If you have children you want to teach them that you're, they're loved, they're validated, they're supported, and you're valuable, you have skills and talents and creativity. When you get the exact opposite at home and then you get this bullshit from the government, what the, can you imagine?

I don't know if I told you this story. When I was in therapy I was, this was in the early '60s, and after each session my, the psychologist, Dr. Abraham, would have a yellow manila folder and he's, he would be writing some notes, and I was wondering, "Doctor, what are you writing?" And he said, "I'm writing, 'Toru is fucked up.'" And for the first time I felt good when somebody said, "Toru is fucked up," because he knew, right then I knew that this guy knows what the hell he's talkin' about. If he would've told me, "You're okay," I would've said, "You're full of shit." I was fucked up and I grew up that way. And, but thanks god, I tell you, thank god that Dr. Abraham, he taught me something in therapy -- he's still my therapist -- and the thing that he taught me was, no matter what the world does to you, and no matter what the people say about you, it doesn't make you one iota a lesser person. But when we were growing up, you were only what, your value was what other people said about you. If they said you were good, you're good. If they said you're a piece of shit, you're a piece of shit. But to get all that shit out of your head and say, hey, I define what the hell I am. I define my value as a human being, my skills, my talents, my integrity, etcetera, my faithfulness, my... faithfulness. But it's one thing to know something in your head, but to feel the feeling in your heart is a, two different things. And that's been my lifelong struggle, is to know in my heart, feel in my heart what I know in my head. So I learned a long time ago, the first half of your life you learn all this bullshit. The second half of your life you try to get over the, try to forget it and to learn the real stuff, that you're only as good as you say you are. I can't control what my wife says about me, and sometimes it ain't very nice. But at least I can, I have control of what I think of myself. I've lived a life where I was tormented inside the house and outside, and I told you, I came close to killing myself a million times and I'm so happy I didn't do it 'cause I have a lot to live for. But I have a lot of pain and a lot of bullshit, too.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.