<Begin Segment 18>
TI: One of the things you do today is that you visit schools and you talk about what happened to Japanese Americans. Can you tell me why you do that?
RH: Well, at first my daughter teaches in Springfield, Illinois, a suburb of Springfield. And so she says that the history teacher don't know about the camp life, and so says, "Well, they were talking about camp one time, internment camps, and they talked to me about it." And they said, "Any of your people that you know went to the camp?" "Oh, yeah, my dad was in the camp." "Would he like to come down and talk about that?" And so she asked me and I says, "Yeah, okay, I'll do it." So I've been doing that since about '97, '98, around in there. So I would go down there every year, then one year my wife says, "Do you think they will kick for gas money?" and they said no. So I didn't go that year, but then we got into it with Jean Mishima, she says, "Go ahead," says, "We'll pay for it." I says, "Who?" She says, "Our organization." Oh, okay, so I don't care. I says, "I'll go down there anyway." I've been doing it for a while and that was the only year I missed since about '97.
TI: Now when you first started doing this, how much did the kids know about the camps?
RH: Nothing.
TI: You mean like nothing?
RH: Nothing, they never knew the camps existed.
TI: And then after they hear your story, what's their reaction?
RH: Thank you for letting us know. Thank you for telling us.
TI: Are they surprised that this happened?
RH: Yeah.
TI: Do they believe you?
RH: I don't know if they really -- they sent me thank you notes and stuff like that, so I guess they did. And then at the time actually I had these photos of the camp, camp life, that the director's personal photographer took, and so I showed them all of them and that was like two hundred pictures. I showed it to one of my friends because he wanted to see them and he says, "It's too much, too many pictures," says, "cut 'em down." So I keep cutting it down, cutting it down, now it's about sixty-five pictures now and I think I ought to cut it down more because Jean says they're giving us only about an hour to say everything we want to say. And she takes about twenty minutes herself, so I got to cut it down. And she wants me to tell them about my escapades, so that takes a long time.
TI: But that's the part I think they'll remember the most.
RH: That's right, they do.
TI: And you'll probably connect with them so much more. I think all of sudden it make the whole experience seems much more real and believable because your story is just so authentic in many ways.
RH: Yeah, that's what they say. Do it, do more of it.
<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.