<Begin Segment 19>

TI: And during... fairly early in the whole process, the government handed out the leave clearance form with questions 27 and 28 about some "loyalty questions." Do you recall any conversations with your family about that and how they answered that?

TU: You know, my mother looked into some of these things and she found out that we could put in a preference of camps. That is like Heart Mountain, Amache, Gila River and so on. You had a choice. And they gave you a choice. Whether they could go through with that choice or accommodated you or not, that was something else. But my mother heard that Colorado was, along with other places compared, was suitable, more livable. So we got sent to Colorado. And the question number 27 and 28 didn't bother us much at all. We pretty well said, "My brother's in the army already, so we want to stay together." I think we all must have answered "yes-yes" to those questions.

TI: Yeah, I was thinking about your family, having your brother already in the U.S. Army was probably fairly rare at that point, at the very beginning of the war. Because once the war started, they didn't allow Niseis to join during that period. So if you had someone in the army, it had to happen before Pearl Harbor, so there probably weren't that many. Did that ever come into play? I mean, was that ever brought up in terms of discussions with others, that you already had a brother in the army? Or did, I guess, in some ways, you would think, why are you there if your brother's already serving in the U.S. Army? It's kind of... I'm just trying to think how did you think about that? It seemed like a contradiction.

TU: It was a contradiction, but I didn't realize at that time that it was a contradiction. I'm a sixteen year old kid, and we did a lot of discussion with my buddy, Joe, we both decided to answer "yes-yes." We talked about it a lot, and why should we pledge allegiance to the emperor? We didn't pledge allegiance to him in the first place. It's like somebody asking a married person, "Do you beat up on your spouse?" And if you answered "yes" you're in trouble, and if you answered "no" you're in trouble. So we had enough smarts to think about those things. And so we used to talk about it and I said, "Joe," if a guy had a gun at my forehead and told me what to do, I'll do whatever he tells me because I want to live another day and hopefully we could do better in the days ahead.

TI: Oh, so that's interesting. So in some ways, that's how you viewed these questions. You kind of knew what the government, how they wanted you to answer in some ways, but you were under duress, you were kind of locked up.

TU: Oh, yeah. When you really think about the legal situation, it's bad. Well, that's another reason why I sympathize with the resisters. We can talk about that later on.

TI: Yeah, but that's kind of the ruling by Judge Goodman for the Tule Lake resisters. He essentially said, "These guys are under duress." So he let them go... well, let them go back to camp. I mean, he didn't put them in federal prison, but he had to return to Tule Lake. Yeah, so legally...

TU: It's a no-brainer. It's wrong.

TI: So your family essentially, they all said "yes-yes," and then your mother was thinking about which camp to go to next because Tule Lake was going to become a segregation camp, and the people who went "yes-yes" would be allowed to go to another camp. And then the other people who said "no-no" at the other camps would then come to Tule Lake.

TU: Tule Lake.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.