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MN: Let's talk about redress. When people started to talk about trying to get redress and reparations from the government, what was your reaction to that?

CO: Well, let me see now. I think it had been mentioned earlier, various people had brought it up and stuff like that, but never seemed to go anywhere. In fact, I think that idea was thought of very early after the war, and then I know that there was one bill passed, I forget what it was called. My memory of that business was my uncle, who was a lawyer, on my mother's side, Nuggets Fujita. [Laughs] Anyway, he said, "Oh, the JACL screwed that one all up," he said. So that's what I thought. I know that all of us... in San Diego, I think they had some kind of a filling out forms, asking for some redress at that stage, and that was in '48 or so, something like that.

MN: Very early, yeah.

CO: Yeah. I went with my dad and filled out forms. But I never found out if anything came of it as far as my immediate family was concerned. I don't know. But after hearing my uncle say something like that, I figured, well, okay, it's probably not much of anything. Anyway, but also, part of the conditions of that redress was that we were never ever to ask for anything again, right? I think my uncle and people were, really thought that was dumb, but... well anyway. So I really didn't think about camps although it was kind of like a little social thing like, "Oh, what camp were you in?" sort of thing, without thinking about the experience, really. And boy, it was really quite a bit later in my life when... well, for one thing, a lot of people never knew about the camps. But it came up with somebody who was a psychologist. This was at a party or something. And she asked me about, had I been in the camps and I said, "Yeah." And she said, "Well, what happened in the camps?" or something, and I said, "Well, I don't know. Nothing much." And this person looked at me and said, "You were between the ages of twelve and fifteen and you feel that it didn't affect you very much?" And I started thinking about that, thinking about that. I had really repressed it all, 'cause it was just a bad experience. Because it was hard to talk about. Nisei didn't want to talk about the real thing, at least on the whole they didn't. And certainly the white community and stuff wanted to think that it had never happened. Because I would hear that kind of thing, like, "Oh, I can't believe it," sort of thing. So it just was not something that came up very much seriously. But then how come it got going in the '70s? That's when, oh, Michi Weglyn's book came out in '76. Yeah, I think reading that.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.