<Begin Segment 9>

BF: Do you remember if at some point either in the assembly centers or at Minidoka, a feeling of sort of the outrage and injustice that later on would sort of, help you?

CK: Well that's interesting. Somehow, eighteen-year-olds I think were more naive in those days, and we accepted, I think, as something, as an authority, what is the phrase? Power of authority, the obedience to authority? That was very strong, particularly in our culture. And you still listened to the government, I mean, you did whatever the government said. There wasn't that feeling of rebellion except for a few, as you know. There were very few who did rebel. But I don't think it really hit me. One event that does stand out is when I went to Minidoka having had a smattering of high school journalism, I applied for the Irrigator and so I, that was, you know, everyone had to work so that was our, my $16 job, was to apply there. And after a while I did some feature articles. Like I did a feminine column and it was called "Feminidoka" and did light things, you know, like what do you do with your hairstyle when the dust is blowing and all that kind of silly stupid stuff. [Laughs] And so then once I sat down to do a column, and it was going to be a reminiscing -- because we had been there maybe a year -- and I was reminiscing about our past and I was going to write a little light article. And I looked at the typewriter and I thought, really, what is so great about this life? And so that's when I wrote the column saying that the dust, the cold and the bitterness, but the worst thing of all was the lack of freedom. That we could not go out, you know, we couldn't go as we pleased and here we were. And it ended -- somebody sent me that column later and I didn't realize I had said -- it ended something like, "We're like birds in a cage," or something like that. And so that's sort of when it really hit me that, you know, here we are prisoners. We're prisoners and we hadn't done anything wrong.

BF: Was it cathartic to sort of write that?

CK: Yeah, it was, sort of. And then the editorials, the editor... the two who first came on, one was Dick Takeuchi who was a professional. I think he had worked for one of the mainstream press and had worked at the UW on their Daily. And then Jackson Sonoda, who was editor of the Japanese Language Courier and North American Post. I don't remember if it was called that then. And they had written some editorials that were, you know, brought out the injustice and things like that. And that gradually got me to realizing that there was such a thing as the Constitution, that we had certain rights. But actually, the anger didn't come out 'til later. I think when the redress movement started. So it was just, a lot of it was the acceptance that this is something we had to bear because we are Japanese and because we're at war with Japan. So it wasn't until later that the full realization of the injustice hit me.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.