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TI: So let's move to something else that you talked about earlier. You mentioned in '44 getting a draft notice. It was halfway through the building of the jail. Did you talk to your father about, about that, about the draft notice?

JY: Yeah, I asked him about it. He's the only one really knew. And he says, "Well, you do what you want. You're old enough to know," says, "You do what you want to do." So, but there's so much elements that came into the picture at the time of my draft evasion of going or not going, 'cause I know my brother, when he came to Tule Lake before he was shipped overseas, and he told me how he was treated. You know, they took the guns away from 'em, gave 'em wooden guns. And then when President Roosevelt came, they corralled 'em in the corner with MP watching them with guns, facing them, you know. And then, too, I myself being, as I said before, a civic, history, I always looked forward to the day I can vote. Naturally, I knew I couldn't vote, but I asked the administrator, "You know, I'm twenty-one and I'd like to go and register to vote." He says, "Hell no, you ain't going no place." But I knew I couldn't vote, but still. Things like that kind of set my mind that, "What you gonna go fight for, really?" Be treated like my brother and not able to be American citizen? And then things like that, well, whether I can get in and out of camp, it didn't bother me that much, too much, but still, how my brother was treated. How my nephew, my second cousin, how he was treated. 'Cause his father was dying in Santa Anita, and they told him... at the time, no Japanese were allowed on the West Coast. After that they released, the commanding officers told my cousin, "If we let you go to California to go see your father, we have to send two escorts with you, and we can't afford to send two escorts with you, so you can't go." So they never saw their father alive again. When he saw his father, he was dead. Time he got to Heart Mountain, he spent five days and four nights on the train on the stretcher without no medication with stomach cancer. So when he got to Heart Mountain, he was just skin and bones.

TI: So you thought about all these injustices that were going on, and so you decided to say, to turn down the draft.

JY: That's right. I felt that if that's how we've been treated, I felt no sense me being treated that way just because I looked different.

TI: So did that change your work situation at camp? I mean, did you all of a sudden decide maybe to change?

JY: No, I was gone for a week and nobody missed me. [Laughs] Well, like my younger sister, she didn't know I even went. 'Cause we had three barracks, three rooms with eleven of us, so they give us two medium-sized rooms and one small room. So the boys all slept in one room and the girls slept in the other room with the parents. So we never really gelled together.

TI: So the time you were gone was that short? I didn't realize it was that short.

JY: Just one week. We left, I think, Thursday or Friday, and we stood in front of the judge Monday morning, and then the following Saturday, they finished the case, we were exonerated, and then the following... because we were the first ones to be taken over there, so we were the last ones to come home. But it was... Saturday, I think it was Monday by the time we came home.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.