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MN: Toru, tell me about your bus. In Northern California you're the Toru Pilgrimage Bus to Topaz, very well known. When did you start organizing these pilgrimages, and why did you think it was important to organize the pilgrimage back to Topaz?

TS: That's a good question. I went on a excursion to Yosemite, and it was for the elderly, senior citizens, and we got off in Berkeley, got off the bus and two elderly Nikkei women said, "Wouldn't it be nice if they had a bus to Topaz? You know, I've never been back to Topaz," she said. And I heard that, I thought, that's funny, there has never been a bus to Topaz. So I contacted the bus that we just got off of, and I found out what it would entail to charter a bus, and so I did a lot of research and I found out that the bus from Berkeley could go as far as Ely, Nevada, which is on the other side of Nevada. And there was this old town of Ely -- in fact, the oldest hotel in Nevada is in Ely -- and then from there it's about a two and half hour ride on Highway 50 to Utah, and then we would spend our second night in Delta and then the next day come back as far as Reno, stay the third night there and then come back to Berkeley. So I organized this bus. I did it all by myself. I had a friend that helped me, but, and I really couldn't have done it without her help. Kaz Iwahashi was a, she was a godsend. She was the organized one. I'm the unorganized one. And so I put in ad in the paper, the Nichi Bei, the Hokubei and all the papers I could. I made posters and put it up in the Japanese churches, the temples. I put, at the restaurants, I went to Tokyo Fish, I went to every place that a Japanese American would go to, and, and little by little they, people would call and say, "I want to go." And so I'd be, got about twenty-seven people the first time. And I found out that on a chartered bus, alcohol is completely permitted, so I had, I had this big chest, ice chest with water, soft drinks, beer, and sake. So my friend Harry Yonemura from Southern California brings a few boxes of just amazing sushi, so, and then I bought a karaoke machine because this bus that I chartered has a table in the back, the bathroom is halfway back and downstairs, so the, the back of the bus is this wraparound seat like a, like in restaurant, with a table, so I had a AC line brought in, from a, from DC conversion, converted to AC, so I had my karaoke machine stuck in there. So we were doing karaoke, drinking sake, beer, wine, whatever the hell and having a good old time.

But the thing that really came out on these trips were the stories that these older people told. Until then, that time it was somehow, it's really interesting how... I just did, let's see, the fourth bus this, earlier this year. The stories that people come out with, going back to Topaz, I guess, is a, you feel safe because you're among nothing but Japanese and people start, the closer you get back to Topaz, the memories start coming up and they talk about really meaningful stories about how their family were affected, et cetera. And so you hear all these great stories, and there's, I don't know if you know this, but there were three hundred and eighty-seven children born in Topaz and most of them have never been back. You would think, being born in a concentration camp, you'd want to go back one day, just to see where you were born, but for whatever reason these kids have a built-in adversity to go back to -- I mean, I guess it's like, if you were born in a prison would you want to go back to prison and say, "Hey, San Quentin, here I am. This is where I was born," you know? Maybe this is the stigma of that, but it's amazing, there was, let's see, one, two, maybe four or five people who were born in Topaz but never been back that came on these buses, I mean this last bus, and the other buses.

And I remember a friend of mine who never showed any emotion. He came back on my first bus, and he was a high school buddy of mine, and he said when he went to the block that he, his family was in, he said these tears came to his eyes, and I said, "How come?" And he said, "You know, when I see the ground where my mother and father lived and the mess hall where they ate," he said just all these emotions came up because he knew this was no picnic to be there, and yet his parents survived somehow. And I guess to, to, I don't know, to keep yourself together you, you suppress all these memories. You hear these, the most common story you hear is, "My parents never talked about it." They never talked about it. They didn't want to talk about it. And you don't blame them. Do you want to talk about when you got, some horrible thing happened to you? But when people go back it's always a, it's a way to kind of heal.

And somebody said something, in fact, Satsuki, Dr. Satsuki Ina said, and I think there's so much truth to this, sometimes when you go to the place where you lost your power, that's the, that's the very place where you regain your power. And I thought that was so beautifully said and true. So for, every time I have a Topaz bus -- and by the way, every time I did a Topaz bus I said, "I'll never do this again," because I worried about every goddamn thing. If somebody, I worried about somebody falling off the bus, breaking their arm or hittin' their head or God only knows, and these are elderly people and many of them are dead today that were on my Topaz bus. But I kinda feel in my heart that it was a good thing, that, in fact, somebody just told me recently, "Toru, you're providing a service for these people." It wasn't that much fun for me 'cause I had to worry about every damn thing. People would come up to me and say, Toru, this and this and this," and I'd go, oh my God. The most mundane things, the most unimportant thing, people would worry about, and you have to be a therapist for them to get over their thing, and they'd have these little squabbles and, but in retrospect it was worth it because I think these people need to reconnect with what we went through. And in some ways you learn that it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. It was bad, but going back, I really know how bad it was, but maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought it was when it's just a fantasy in your mind. When you see the whole thing you say, gee, we survived, we survived this bullshit? Maybe I deserve some kudos. So in that respect I think it was a healing thing, it's been for me.

MN: When was your first Topaz bus?

TS: Where?

MN: When. What year?

TS: It was 2002.

MN: So that's shortly -- now, 2002, and you've had about four?

TS: Right. 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2010. In fact, the 2002 one is when I met that, my first grade teacher. I've been in contact with her ever since. She lives in Pasadena. She's a San Francisco girl, and she's still teaching. She's still teaching. She must be ninety years old. So some things never change.

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