<Begin Segment 16>

TI: So I'm going to now go back in time, and during the break you mentioned that your father is a minister. You mentioned that nearby, I can't remember how close, but there were three bachelors who later on became well-known ministers. But did your father, what's the right word, ever try to cultivate young men to become ministers? Or I'm just curious if he had any connections with these three bachelors or do you recall any of that?

RO: Other than being just friendly, I don't think my dad did much, at least I don't recall or hear of him ever cultivating someone else to be a minister. He, you know, he had... I found out through my stepmother after my dad was killed in the auto accident that my father at the age of sixty-five was still having nightmares about being sent to camp because he and my mother arrived here with high hopes. This is America, this is the land of the free, my dad really believed that. And when we were sent to camp the way we were with the soldiers marching us and doing all of that, I didn't realize until years later that it affected him to the core. 'Cause he was killed in an automobile accident when he was sixty-five, and at that age my stepmother told me that he would wake up and be screaming in his dream. "Those of you who could speak English, why don't you speak up? They can't do this to us." He had been going to those English classes before the war broke out and was studying also American history. He was devastated that this ideal country that he had come to had done this to the Japanese community. He was... I mean, it affected him to the end of his life.

TI: Well, it seemed like the other thing that tormented him was 'cause he spoke some English and it was almost like the other Isseis were looking to him like, "If only we could explain or talk to them, this wouldn't happen," and it felt like he almost felt this burden that because he could speak English they were looking to him to lead them out of this in some way he felt perhaps.

RO: Perhaps I don't know, I wish that I were old enough at that time to have discussed all of this with him. And even as an adult we didn't talk about camp. And as I interviewed other people, the families didn't talk about the camps. For twenty years or so until Carter's commission when they had all those... what did they call those?

TI: The commission hearings.

RO: The hearings. So until then nobody talked about it.

TI: Yeah, and even to this day many times the parents haven't talked to their children.

RO: That's right.

TI: They may have talked a little bit more but even, yeah, it's still not.

RO: It's sad because we don't have the voice of the Isseis and what they went through and what it did to them emotionally and just physically for many of them losing everything they had in terms of financial gains that they had made up to that point.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.