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TI: Now, at Santa Anita, I'm wondering if you had any recollection. There was, some people have called it a riot or a disturbance at Santa Anita, where there was, I think it may have been caused by frustration of the prisoners inside Santa Anita. Do you have any recollection of things like that?

MY: No, at Santa Anita I have no recollection of any uprising of any groups of people. There were some minor disturbances, which was understandable in the... not the stockade, the horse stalls. If you know anything about horse stall, they're lined up where the horses go in, two at a time to a horse stall, and then there's a walkway connected all the stalls. Well, they had divided the walkway by connecting it into the stalls itself by four by eight plywood, and above the four by eight foot plywood there's open space all the way through. For each section of the stall and the extension there's only one bulb hanging down, no big deal for the likes of our family, but for those families with young children and babies, they needed to heat their milk for the babies and they put extensions on it. When you have a number of extensions going out of one central unit, you had blackouts quite often because it would overload the system, and then finally administration said too many extensions being out, so all the extensions were pulled out. Well naturally, there was some reverberation to this because it was a necessary item, which the administration had not thought of, so that was one of the problems, and was, cannot be called a mob action or anything. It was a minor, understandable action. I think it was understandable even by the administration.

TI: Well, there's also, when I talk to some of the L.A. people, there was also during that time tension about informants within --

MY: Informants?

TI: Yeah, informants, people who were --

MY: Inu.

TI: Yeah, inu or people that were, and they've mentioned that perhaps even a Korean American or something in there. Was there any, did you hear any of that?

MY: I was not aware of any. The group I associated with was farmers and college age kids, and somehow within this group of people there was no issues.

TI: How about tensions between Niseis and Isseis?

MY: Nisei and...

TI: Yeah, the Issei and Nisei, essentially you start seeing the, especially in southern California, there was a lot of JACL activity and so you had this emergence of these Niseis who were taking more and more control or charge of the leadership of what was going on. But that created tensions with the Isseis oftentimes. Did you see...

MY: In retrospect, historically, I'm aware of this, but at that time, April through November of '42, I was not aware of those tensions. It was only, I'm not quite aware. See, I later became quite involved in JACL, but until JACL took action, national policy on working with the elderly, which is about, how many years ago, their policy was to help Issei.

BT: Oh, citizenship?

MY: Became a national policy within JACL.

TI: Was that around the immigration or the ability to become citizens?

MY: About, somewhere about that period.

TI: So that would be early 1950s.

MY: Anyway, up to that point I was anti JACL because of this issue, because JACL was actively involved with the evacuation. Now, there are a number of different perceptions of this, JACL perspective and anti JACL-perspective, which is a little too strong for the satisfaction of most of us here. But in any event, I was anti-JACL because of this issue, yes. I had heard the rumors, at that point it was rumors, which later was confirmed by specific actions, signed papers. However, again going back to that point, it was not an issue for me as a person because was not involved in any of those immediate questions.

TI: Okay, good. And I appreciate you making that distinction of what you saw as a young man versus what you learned later on. Sometimes people sort of just confuse that or mix it all up, so that was really good. I liked that.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.