<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Okay, so let's start the second part. We had just, where we left off was December 7, 1941, and you talked about your friend coming and, and turning, having you turn the radio on. I asked about were you surprised or your thoughts and you're glad that you got, you actually got back and how so many Niseis didn't make it back. But let's go back, did you ever get a chance to talk to your mom and dad about this? Did they have any thoughts about Japan going to war against the United States?

HL: I think it's just so much of the Issei is, well, you take things as they come. What are you gonna do about it? There's not much you can do. Doesn't... the Japanese, very many Japanese Isseis particularly, I think, are basically very fatalistic in terms of what will be will be and you make the best of it.

TI: And yet there are, when I think of the Isseis, there's a lot of pride in being Japanese also.

HL: Oh yeah, they're very, yeah, there's pride. But then the thing is, you know, what are you gonna do about it? Their, I think their feeling was, sure, you're proud to be a Japanese and you're always proud to be, they were always very proud of Japan, but on the other hand, if the war breaks out, what are they gonna do?

TI: How would you characterize in terms of, would you say your dad was, like, pro Japan? Was he hoping that the war would end but that Japan would win, or did you have any talk about that?

HL: No. And I don't think, I think they were very ambivalent. All the, I think, Isseis were very ambivalent in terms of, in some ways this was where they had made their life and this is where their children were, this is, the children were gonna be Americans, and, but then, but they, yet they felt they couldn't -- this is why the, when they had that, that twenty-seven and twenty-eighth questions on that, it was so difficult for them, because they said, "What are we gonna do? We don't have citizenship here, but then our kids our here." And I think that was the way they felt. I think, let's see, when I think back to it, I think there was resentment at the way we were treated because the minute the war started, the prejudice, you couldn't go here, they had, they had set up zones where you could not go and they had curfew, and so there was a lot of resentment.

[Interruption]

TI: So how about the Niseis? Did you ever talk with your sister, your brother, your friends about, about what this meant to you or the community?

HL: I think we all felt a lot of resentment because we were treated as second class citizens. And I think, the one thing I remember so vividly about the whole evacuation and all that was when we went to Puyallup, we were the last group that went in, we were in Camp D, but I remember the buses rolling into, up to the camp and I saw all these people I knew standing on the other side of the barbed wire fence and then the machine guns were pointed at them, not out. And I thought, but we're American citizens. Why are we being treated this way? And then, of course, when you saw the accommodations, I mean, that was just... [laughs]

TI: And what were your expectations? When you saw the machine guns pointing inwards, I mean, what were you expecting?

HL: It wasn't so much expectation as it, I think it really hit you then that this is really something very serious and that they don't trust us.

TI: Before you left, you were the last group to go, what did your parents do with the Ritz apartments? What happened to that?

HL: We just left it. Because, see, we didn't actually own it. We were leasing it to rent, and so we sold what we could and what we couldn't sell we just left. I mean, there was nothing else. But the thing that's very interesting is one thing my mother took along that I don't think anybody else in the whole world would've thought to take along. She took along wallpaper. She said, "You know," she says, "I don't know where we're gonna be, but," she said, "if you put wallpaper on the wall it feels more like home." And the first thing she did when we got out to Puyallup and we were in these, it was really nothing more than a chicken coop kind thing, she slapped on that wallpaper, and I think we're the only people in the whole camp that had wallpaper on their walls, but to her that was something that was important to her.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.