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MN: Now, how did the camp experience change the way you viewed yourself in the Nikkei community?

CO: I knew that I didn't fit into a rural setting. And then the camp experience also made me feel like I didn't fit into the whole Nikkei community, you know. I just didn't like that having to watch everything you said and did, that you were expected to behave in certain ways and stuff like that. That just did not sit well with me. And I could see particularly women really having to take a second-class citizen role almost within the family. I saw a lot of patriarchs who were really nasty guys. But on the other hand, I must say that the people prewar were a much more rambunctious group than they emerged out of camp. Drunken parties and gambling and you know, sort of like good times and just enjoying things more. That was my impression. I think the camps really killed a certain spirit in the community.

MN: Is that what keeps you active in the Nikkei community as you tried to revive that? You're still very active in the Nikkei community.

CO: Yes and no. Because I did kind of live out of it for quite a while in my earlier adult years. But once I got really interested in the whole camp experience, it brought me back to the community. And I have thought about all this a great deal in that something was killed in our community because of the camp experience. Maybe not just some "thing" but a bunch of things.

MN: Now, what brought you back to the camp experience?

CO: You know, I think I was reading the transcript and maybe I went through some of this already, but encountering... well, I was already an adult of course, and encountering some person who was a psychologist or something. I mean, at a party, this was not a professional thing. And she must have known about a lot of this because she just said, "Oh, so how old were you when you were in the camps?" I really hadn't given it much thought and I said, "Well, I was between the ages of twelve and fifteen." And she said, "Those are really formative years. Have you thought about how they might have affected you?" And then I began to realize, boy, I really blanked out those camp years. I just did not choose to think about 'em at all. Well, that was kind of like the first glimmer of interest. And then Michi Weglyn's book came out in 1976, and you know how you do things sometimes and you're not sure why you did it? But I bought the book and I didn't read it immediately, but I had it around. And I think when I started reading it, I really didn't understand it. Okay, this was, say, late 1970s already. When did redress really start picking up? Sometime after that, yeah. I remember I was living down here in the Bay Area and I joined the group which was called Asian Americans for Community Involvement, AACI, I remember that. And it was a group of young Asian Americans, and it was a mixed group. And they were organizing to, I guess to help... well, I guess it was to deal with the parental generation, sort of like they were going to set up projects and social works and stuff like that and organize, politically organize and that kind of thing. And there, I started gradually thinking more about it because I think it came up more and more. It hadn't for a long time. But my real activity was when I move up to Seattle, and that's when a real organized situation began to take form. And it was lucky that I was with the Seattle group because they were the most active of all of these people. I was able to step into that and learn a lot from Henry Miyatake and Shosuke Sasaki, those guys. 'Cause they had done a lot of spadework digging into the records and things, so they knew a lot.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.