<Begin Segment 9>

SY: So when did that awareness of being Japanese American, having gone through what your family went through, when did that start to become more of an issue for you?

PS: Well, I had a chance to get a good look at myself, I went to a human relations camp, I was on the staff for ten years. It was called Brotherhood Camp, Brotherhood USA.

SY: And was it connected to a church?

PS: No, it was sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, NCCJ. It was held up in the mountains, it was held at different places but when I got involved with it it was between '73 and '83 and it was held at Pilgrim Pines which is a camp that is owned by the United Church of Christ up above Yucaipa. It's apple country. You go up the hills and there are apple groves that were up there. So it was a program that helped high school kids come to terms with who they were.

SY: And you were how old then?

PS: Well, I was an adult, I was a counselor, upper forties I think, forty-eight, forty-nine. And so there was extensive training before we would work with the kids. And the training involved looking at oneself ethnically, so we had a multiracial group of the staff, the Asians, the blacks, Latinos and whites and few Native Americans. So we sat around and I was able to talk to other Asian Americans, Japanese, and talk about what it meant to be Asian Americans, talk about terminology. You want to be called Asian, you want to be called Oriental, what do you want to be called? And so we kind of parsed the whole issue, Asian you're talking about a place where the Orientals is kind of nebulous and the difference between the two terms and so forth. So it gave me a chance to look at myself and look at what it meant to be Asian and to think about my experience and how my experience in this country had an effect of making me not like my Japanese-ness because of the war experience and come to terms with that. And also come to terms with other Asians. I was always indoctrinated growing up from my, mainly from my grandmother, Japanese are at the top, somewhere down the ladder is the Chinese, then the Koreans, at the bottom of the ladder are the Filipino, so I mean geez. So it was kind of a hierarchy or who and where you were and so I realized that was not the kind of thing that I wanted to cling to. So that was part of the training, so after the different groups talked about who what it meant to be who they were Latinos, the black people, then we kind of got together and we talked about, kind of shared information. So it was a very growth producing experience for me. I got more out of it than the kids because I think I'd been through more insofar as having to face being who I was. So it was just a week each summer for ten years, but I profited a great deal and actually some of the people who were there with me, they didn't work as long as I did but some well-known people like Ron Wakabayashi was on the staff there.

SY: Active in the JACL.

PS: Karl Nobuyuki, the former national director. Alan Kumomoto was on staff, Mark Ridley Thomas was there with the person he eventually married.

SY: So there was a Japanese American contingency that was there at this --

PS: No, they weren't all there at the same time but they went through the same experience I did. It dawned on me that Yellow Brotherhood was a very well-known experience, and I'm just wondering -- and Ron Wakabayashi once came to our JACL chapter to tell us about his experience in organizing Yellow Brotherhood, I was just wondering if his experience at Brotherhood Camp was -- I'm sure it had some carryover as to what caused him to organize Yellow Brotherhood.

SY: So really having grown up around other Japanese Americans, but did you feel close to that community or were you also a little not -- where did you feel like you fit in terms of the people that you grew up with and the people that you associated with after as you became an adult?

PS: Japanese, really by default. I mean for one thing when you have segregated housing you don't have much choice, you're there with the Japanese, I mean, you can't get away. All the events are all connected there and then you go to a Japanese church and it's all Japanese.

SY: So you're the most comfortable in that setting?

PS: Oh, yeah, right.

SY: And this human relations event every year helped you open up to others?

PS: Yeah, it helped me to separate myself and have a more sense of identity, a better sense of who I was as a Japanese American and to understand myself better. In very blunt terms, it's to grow up in times of war when you are the enemy, it's easy to get self-hatred, it's easy to internalize rejection of who you are. And that's where I was coming from and it was hard for me to admit that to myself and yet I can understand myself and I can say hey, that makes sense. If I didn't, there would be something wrong with me, I mean but it's something like a form a therapy you have to realize you're okay. So some of your attitudes and some of your ways of looking at things is understandable that you turned out that way but you don't have to continue that way.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.