<Begin Segment 22>

TI: So, Ruth, I came to the end of my questions. Anything else I'm missing? Anything else that you want to add or talk about?

RO: Well, related to Poston or just --

TI: Your life, your family, your mother, your anything.

RO: I've been very, very lucky to have three kids that I am so proud of and at first when I was doing a lot of my art work related to my experience in camp, it was like, "Why are dealing with this, Mom?" So my one son said, "Why don't you... if you're going to paint, why don't you get beyond this?" And I said, "Alright, I'll try." So I stretched out a canvas, a pretty large one, put it on my easel, and I started to paint. And it's in oil and so I had a photograph of one of my sons in the swimming pool when he was a little kid so I thought well, that's a good non related Poston stuff so I started to paint the plastic, you know, they still probably have them, those plastic pools for toddlers to play in. I started to put that in and then I was painting my son and I painted the pool red. Before I knew it everything was red, white, and blue again. And I thought, "Okay, this is crazy I just have to get this out of my system, everything is going to be red, white, and blue, barbed wires and everything else and until I can get this out of my system I'd better go, just do it." So from there I started to do some drawings and a couple of them are in that book, Sharing a desert home, I did a... it took me a hundred hours and I had to use my magnifying glass but I did a drawing, a fairly large drawing of my third grade class and drew every single classmate.

TI: So third grade, this was in Poston?

RO: In Poston, yeah, it's a picture from Poston. And it's a fairly large drawing, it's in, as I said, it's in that research. But that was very therapeutic for me. I think that was the last really camp-related drawing that I did after a hundred hours and my eyes practically gone. I then moved on to more of a... I still dealt with red, white, and blue but it was different. I had this one drawing, I think it's in the research book of I'm in a Japanese kimono but it's red, white, and blue and I have barbed wire, I have... what do they call that thing?

TI: Oh, yeah.

DH: Obi.

RO: Obi, right, in the obi which is had blue and white, my kimono was red and then as I was drawing the obi I thought, ah ha, I'd put barbed wire. I wasn't going to put any barbed wires anywhere but I ended up putting the barbed wire around the obi. And then as I was drawing, working on that drawing, I decided to put my parents, I wanted to honor my parents so there's a drawing of my mother and father and their alien registration number and in the middle is my Uncle George who served in the 442nd and I then I felt, "Okay, maybe this will help me get beyond the red, white, and blue."

TI: And the use of red, white, and blue, is it for irony, I mean, so you have barbed wire, red, white, and blue in terms of the flag, so you keep going back to that theme. Is it just to show that irony?

RO: Right, it's my way of expressing what the experience was like for not only the Isseis but for us young people. But in that drawing, instead of using my face which I started to do, I asked my daughter to come over and she sat for me and I put her face on that drawing.

TI: Now, all this artwork, have you ever done a show, like a big exhibit?

RO: I did. I did an exhibit at the cultural center here in San Francisco. And I had about twenty something pieces. Put it up all on the wall and the day of... the night before the opening, some man chased a young woman into the center there, so the police came in and yellow tagged everything and put the yellow tape all over everything. Nobody could get into my exhibit. And the next day was the opening and it was just like, "Oh, well, that's kind of ironic isn't it?" Could've put a soldier's uniform on that guy and that little girl maybe was a Japanese American girl running for her life. [Laughs] Anyway, we had to postpone the opening. That was so strange and I thought, "Man, I hope that little girl survives and gets over what had happened to her." It was scary. I wish that I could've gone and talked to that girl but I'm sure she wouldn't want anybody knowing what had happened to her. But we had to postpone the opening which I thought, I was thinking about it... at first I was like, ah, we had worked so hard.

TI: Yeah, but you're right, the symbolism of that.

RO: Yeah, then I started feeling sorry for that little, that girl, I don't know how little she was but then I thought, "Why am I upset?" I mean, think about what happened to that girl, that little girl, that young girl. And so we just postponed the opening.

TI: And how long ago was that? When was this?

RO: When was the opening? That's a good question. Let's see... it was about the time maybe ten years... '98.

TI: Okay, so it was quite a while ago?

RO: Yeah, because I had been away to do the filming, I was with the crew doing the Children of the Camps and I had to... I had been working to put the exhibit up. Yeah, it was some time ago. I hope that never happens again to some --

TI: And what was the reaction of people of your exhibit?

RO: Interesting. I still have all the collected comments. It was fairly, you know, it was, "Thanks for doing this," and, "It's been educational," that kind of comment. But I'd have to go back and look at my book to see because I wasn't there all the time. It was open to the public at certain hours. But when I was working on one of my paintings, I had one of my colleagues, or a woman just a few years older than me, she had been at breakfast at our local cafe and I bumped into her and she wanted to visit my studio. So I invited her over and I had my big canvas out, I mean the drawing I was working on. And she came in and with tears starting to come to her eyes she said, "Ruth, why are you doing this? Why do you want to bring all of this up?" And it was like I didn't have the heart to turn to her with her eyes welling up and say it's because of that. Because we haven't really worked through it all and maybe we never will, maybe we'll take all of this to our grave. But if anything, I'm doing this because I want the public to know what happened to us. And at that time Hayakawa was doing that thing about the Iranians and I thought, "It can't happen again. I mean you don't do this to your fellow citizens." I tried to do it as kindly as I could while she was welling up in tears but I got a lot of comments like that: "Why do you want to dig up something from the past?" And I guess I was thinking, "And why do you not want to educate the public?" It could happen any time to some other minority group or whether it's racial or like the gays or any other minority.

TI: Religion.

RO: Religion absolutely, I mean, it could happen any time again. I don't think that what happened during World War II to the Japanese American community is isolated and will never happen again. I think this country is ripe for that kind of thing 'cause this is a democracy. I felt sorry for her I didn't know what to say to her. Obviously she was overcome by her own memories maybe.

TI: But I think I view this as a process, I mean, I think of when your show came out, that was about the time Densho started and we in a similar way had comments like, "Why are you doing this?" But I think now it's what, about you know, twelve, fifteen years after that. I think that more people are accepting of this type of work so I think it is kind of this healing or process that people are going through.

RO: The history needs to be recorded and I just think it's critical that the story be told. The schoolchildren, schoolkids learn of it.

TI: Well, I think that's a perfect place to end. So, Ruth, fabulous job, thank you so much.

RO: Oh, you're welcome.

TI: I'm glad we finally did this yeah and that I got a chance to actually do the interview, I'm glad that I got to do this.

RO: Well, thank you for your interest in Poston and thanks for all your work that you're doing at Densho. I think it's important.

TI: As you know, I love this, I get to meet such great people.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.