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MN: I wanted to ask about your family here in the United States who were put in camp. Did your mother ever talk about what her camp experience was like?

JD: No. I really never got to talk too much about it. I've got a picture of her, one picture of her in camp. And she, as I mentioned, she was pregnant when we went to, when my father and I went to Japan, so the baby was born November of '41 and she's, so my mother had four children to take care of. Fortunately, she had her parents there, so they stayed with her and wherever they moved they all moved together. They went to Tule Lake first from Sacramento, went to Jerome, Arkansas... Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas, and then finally went to Amache and they came out of there when the war ended, so they had quite a bit of moving. And then my mother also had this sister, my aunt, they kind of lived together and was close to get in contact, so that was her group that they stayed together. And out of that her youngest brother, my mother's youngest brother went to service, not 442nd, but one of the, he went to service and served in the Philippines and then occupation force in Japan, so I got to see him in Japan when he came to Japan. He was nineteen years old then. And, no, was it nineteen? Yeah, it, my uncle -- no, couldn't have been. Yeah, he, I guess he was nineteen. Little over, yeah, about twenty, twenty or twenty-one.

MN: Did you ever visit any of the camp sites with your mother or your siblings?

JD: What, other?

MN: Did you ever visit any of these camp sites with your mother or your siblings?

JD: No -- oh, I went to Topaz one time. That was the only one I went. I never got interest in going to Tule Lake. My brother said he drove up there. Went to Topaz just two of us, my wife and I went there one time. And then went a bus trip to Topaz; that was the second time then, went to Topaz. Manzanar, I went there couple of times, but that's quite recently I went there.

MN: Having, having viewed what Topaz looked like and Manzanar, what are your thoughts?

JD: Well, it, my interest was, gee, what the people have gone through. I just wanted to see what, what the site looked like. I read about it and the horror of it, the season and so forth, and yeah, I just wanted to see how horrible it was. And truly the, whatever you see in the museum, you could feel the, the sadness of people broken down, losing all their properties and so forth. I could, whenever I read an article about the camp life I really relate to it.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.