<Begin Segment 22>

LH: Well, it's really interesting that when I read the survey that you had finished, that one of the questions in there was if you were to rate your camp experience, how would you rate it? And you answered, at the time, neither best or worst years of your life, but in retrospect you thought that perhaps they were the worst years of your life. Could you explain that a little bit?

FK: Yeah. I think, I think we as kids probably didn't know what was going on. And it was kind of nice because you had all your cousins near you and you had your friends near you. I heard a lot of the guys anyway, that were in their teens, saying it was a really great time because they'd never seen so many teenage women or girls in their life, so it was really great socially. But when I think back on that time, I'm thinking my father wasn't with us most of the time and I think that had a real effect on me. I think the general attitude at that time, was destroy most things that are Japanese, because we don't want the FBI to come and get us and take us away. So a lot of my cultural background was probably taken away or hidden. And the implication from that is that it's not a good deal to be Japanese. And I think, a lot of that happened because of concentration camp period.

And... I think although we as children say we weren't as affected, because it was the grownups who went through the hardship and all the things that they lost and so forth... you can't help feeling like that feeling of, of despair and the feeling of not being treated as equals to other people and the feeling of fright and so forth did not transfer to us, I'm sure it transferred to us. And I think it had a lot to do with me growing up, spending a lot of time, wishing that I was white. That I could be as good of an American as the rest of the kids that I knew in my class. And, and trying as hard as I can, probably to deny a lot of my Japanese heritage, without being smart enough to realize that somebody just had to look at me and know I wasn't white. Because you tried so hard to fit in, so hard to be a... person of significance, and still felt like you had the handicap of not being the same as everybody else there. And that, a lot of that could have been because we were also on Bainbridge Island, raised in a community that wasn't... very Japanese-y. I mean it was predominantly white, especially when we came back, since only about half of us came back. Out of the two hundred and something that left, maybe just half of us came back. So maybe out of the fifty, I think it was either fifty-four or forty-five (families). I get the two numbers mixed up sometimes -- but I guess, I think about half of us, half of the families came back. So, when we entered school here, although, I don't remember anybody ever really giving me a real, real bad time. I'm sure there were times when people either hated, didn't like to associate with me or didn't associate with me 'cause I was different.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.