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PT: And I'm jumping a long ways now, and I'm now at the University of Illinois, and I'm in the second writing class. It's a summer class and the guy says, "Write a page or two on using descriptive writing," and I wrote it. He gave me a 'D'.

TI: So you wrote it, what did you write about?

PT: I wrote about that night.

TI: Okay, so you wrote a description of what happened that night.

PT: A description. And then he gives me a 'D-minus' and kind of an 'F.' They give it for writing style or something like that. And at the bottom he said, "What about the boys in Bataan?" And the only thing you could do was, "Oh, shit. When is this thing going to end?" So I went up to him after class and I said, "What's the meaning of this?" And he said, "Just what it says." So my experience at the University of Illinois was one semester and one day. [Laughs]

TI: We'll come back to your college life, but that's a good story. So you wrote about this night in Manzanar. Up to that point, had you shared that story with other people about what happened that night? Did anyone ask you about the night when this young man died or anything like that?

PT: Yes.

TI: So you talked about it to other people?

PT: There isn't much more to say other than... you can't talk to anyone. They give you this heavy, it was a World War I jacket. And my body just got colder and colder and colder. Normally when something like that happens, you want to go to the john to pee or something. I didn't pee or anything, I just sat there. The only reason I was there is I was required to be there until a certain time. Otherwise, I would have run out of there. And that changed me slowly. For example, there's a line in the Pledge of Allegiance: "One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all." And I said to myself, "That is a pile of shit," and I never, never salute the flag. I despite this. I don't vote. I used to vote, but I don't vote anymore. The whole thing is a fraud. When the government does something like this to an innocent people and people die like this, how can you reflect the country? So everything I did after that is pretty much a criticism of this.

TI: What occurs to me, one, you lived through this very traumatic experience, that night, and then what made it much worse was when you wrote about it, the professor totally discounted it.

PT: Yes.

TI: And so it's that combination, I think, is even more difficult. Because other people lived through traumatic times, but then for you to then have that experience, not honored or listened to, probably made it more difficult for you.

PT: So what I did is I went to Palestine.

TI: This is much later.

PT: Many, many years later. About ten years ago or twelve years ago I went to Palestine. They have the same fucking thing there. The Jews have concentration camps, only unlike the Japanese, you have to cook for yourself. At least we had toilets that could be treated, but not there. It's all open toilet flowing into the sea there. So I've become anti-Israel, and I argue this with them, too. I tell them, "Don't fuck with me. Why don't you go and look for yourselves?" So it did change me, and it changed me very, very strongly. So I don't vote. This country's just full of shit.

TI: Let's just talk about this. So how is it that a country can do this? Supposedly we're a democracy run by the people, and how is it that the public will allow these things to happen? One, to what happened to Japanese Americans, but then what's happening in Palestine? How is it that the average person -- because the sense I have from you is if they knew the truth, it would be different.

PT: Well, what I did is when I became a professor, I did studies like police use of deadly force. And this is a public health document. For every one white man killed by the police, nine blacks are killed. And maybe the nine blacks created a situation where they would be shot. So I would look at the nine people who died and one of them was stopped by the police. He made a mistake at night, never get out of the car. You get out of the car, the police shot and killed him. And I'm writing these things, and I'm in the school of criminology now, and Reagan becomes the governor of California. And the first thing he did was shut down the school.

TI: So all you're doing, though, is writing the statistics. These are numbers, truth. But going back to a police officer who would shoot someone for just coming out of their car, no threat or anything, is it because the police officer is frightened?

PT: No. Racism. It's absolute racism. Little kid on a bicycle is shot. I took the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, our paper, and the Chicago paper and I just went through it, and then I'd cut it out and then I'd publish it. And I was the editor of the journal, so it goes in there. [Laughs] So that was my career. And that, of course, was the end of the School of Criminology. But that's the award they gave me for it.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.