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TI: Before we continue, I wanted to go back and ask about your father. When you decided to leave camp, did you have a discussion with your father about that and leaving camp, and what his state was at that point?

PT: He was out of it. He was really out of it and never went out. Only at night when my mother brought fruit to him. He was in a state of shock. And to jump up a little bit, I came out of the army and then maybe a day or two afterwards, he went into the County Hospital and I forgot what it was, but he had surgery and he died. He was sixty-two years old, and my mother died shortly after that, fifty-eight years old.

TI: Was it the camp experience or the experience of losing his farm? What was harder on him?

PT: Well, I think it's more like I see my doctor once a year. It was that kind of thing. When you're poor, you don't see a doctor unless you have to see a doctor.

TI: But your father, you mentioned in camp he was "out of it," he wouldn't go out. What caused that?

PT: I never thought about that. I think he left Japan because he was not going to serve in the military.

TI: No, not that far. The question is --

PT: So given that, he comes to this country feeling that he will never be harassed in this way. And the military comes by and takes his land and then imprisons him. I mean, everything he believed in and everything he thought would be an improvement turned out to be a disaster. He had no options, he didn't know what to do. He could very well have committed suicide at that time, but he didn't. There have been cases at Manzanar where the father took a kitchen knife, killed his wife, killed his daughter, and then cut himself and died. There were a lot of things that happened that there no way of getting into it, stuff that no one has written. Because for some people, there's no place to go, there's no future. And I'm thinking, "Why would he kill his kid and then his wife, then him?" I don't know. You have to talk to a psychologist about that.

TI: But back to your father, you're saying he left Japan with no intent of going back, and then his new country essentially turned its back on him also.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.