<Begin Segment 10>

MN: Are you working on any other projects right now?

CO: Me? No, nothing big, nothing big. Although Tom was asking me, "Why don't you write?" Well, I may. I may.

MN: You're an expert on the "loyalty questionnaire."

CO: Yeah, right, and I did one first draft on that. And I think that's something that clearly needs to be presented to the public. So yeah, that's something. I really should get that first draft out and work on it some more before I really start losing my marbles. [Laughs] But there is, for me, a real sense of tragedy about this experience for our community, because I feel that it was something that was so traumatic and kind of damaging to people's identity and self-esteem and all these things that it changed the community profoundly.

MN: Do you think redress has sort of partly healed that?

CO: Not for me, because I have gone into it so deeply and stuff like that. I mean, the fact that it got through Congress, which was totally unexpected, 'cause I didn't expect to see it get that far, that was gratifying. And I suppose you could say, "Well, ha ha, we've at last put it into the history books, finally." That, yes. But still, how about all the people who didn't get redress? What about that whole generation of Issei who lost everything? I don't feel... there's just no way to compensate for all that. But this division brought on by who was patriotic and who wasn't, you know, that's a real tragedy for our community.

MN: Do you think in the next generation this rift will heal?

CO: Well, it just won't matter anymore, I think, because we'll be dead, the ones who went through the experience personally will be dead. And so many of the Yonsei and so on have really just melted into the American middle class so that they will have very little knowledge of the kind of discrimination that the earlier generations had to live through, and to be so humiliated as to be stuck in concentration camps for years. That it'll be stories, but hopefully it will have become part of the racial history of this country because of all the racial problems that we've had in this country, and this is just one of them, just happened to fall on our heads. But then again it's like... oh, what should I say? A warning about what can happen to groups even in a so-called democracy like ours. Anyway, the Japanese culture and the American culture in so many ways is so deeply different that those of us Nisei particularly, I think, psychically and having undergone the concentration camp experience and all that, that it was a soul... what should I say? A very wounding kind of thing. And so I think they've gone through with a certain amount of insecurity all of their lives, not exactly knowing who they were. I mean, this whole question of, "Do you know who you are?" That's such an amorphous kind of question, I can't deal with it on that level. But it's just that we do come from various different value systems and they can be very conflicting. I mean, sometimes I used to say things like, "Oh, I have the best of both worlds. I have the good parts of this and the good parts of this, and I can live like that." Yeah, but actually, there are bad parts of this and bad parts of that. And so there are situations when you feel somehow... for instance, I used to joke about this. About how, well, I will go ahead and do what I want to do, but my mother will make sure that I don't enjoy it. [Laughs] That somehow she's there in the back of me disapproving. I've done a lot of things that she wouldn't like. So it's a little extra baggage I carry around with me. And I guess I sort of project that onto other Nisei, too, like, oh, I don't want to tell them about this and that about my life because they'll say I'm a bad person. [Laughs]

MN: Anything else you want to add?

CO: No, I think that's enough. [Laughs]

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