<Begin Segment 10>

SY: Did your sisters...

TF: Yes, they went to the dances. I don't remember peeking in on them, but I know that they were of the age where you could go.

SY: So it was kind of fun for you, too, then.

TF: Yeah. I try not to let anything interfere with getting together because I feel like I want to share that time together.

SY: Yeah, because the age in which you were in camp, most people that were your age don't necessarily have the negative memories.

TF: No. My older sister, I think, she was very bitter and had negative memories. I mean, she just felt, "How can they do this to me? I'm an American citizen." That was my older sister. My second sister, Akiko, who brought her children up to be so Americanized, they'll even tell you themselves. She never really cooked Japanese meals for them. They wanted to fit in. They didn't want to do anything that would emphasize their being different. When I asked her when she was still alive once about camp, because I said, "There are some things I'd like to know," and she said, "Well, I wasn't in camp." She just denied it in her mind that she was ever there. And I said, "No, I was there with you. I remember you. You're my older sister, you were there. And then you went out, that's how you got to be a nurse."

I got to tell you a story about my older sister, though. When she was in camp, she got married, and then she got a job with a banker and his wife in Sikeston, Missouri, as a maid, and the husband was a chauffeur. And the family, I think, got a lot of negative comments from other townspeople, they didn't like the fact that they were a Japanese couple. And then my sister and her husband were really lonely there because no one for them to communicate with. So that couple got one of their friends to get another couple to join them, and they became very good friends with my sister and her husband. And they always stayed good friends while they were alive. But what is unusual in thinking back now is the couple who hired my sister, they were president of a bank in Sikeston, Missouri. They went to the trouble to get clearance for my mother and I to be guests in their home, and we took a bus. I remember my mother being so sick on that bus ride the whole time, but they picked us up. And at the time, as a child, I just had a good time. Looking back on it, I find it, parts of it very painful. But I wanted to, when it was too late, my sister was dead, I didn't know who the name of these people, I didn't know how to get in touch with them. I wanted to thank then because they got my mother and I a pass, paid for our bus trip, to be a guest in their home. And we were really treated as royal guests. But what makes me sad is my sister was the maid. Her husband was the chauffeur. So when we're eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, I as a child, I'm having a great time because there's a little buzzer. She let me be in charge. I'm pressing that buzzer, "I would like this, I would like that." My sister's waiting on me hand and foot 'cause I'm a guest. But how terrible. My sister was like a mother to me. But I'm not thinking.

SY: That's an odd situation to be in.

TF: Yes, but how nice that this family got us out. It wasn't just like you could pull someone out of camp, they had to go through a lot of paperwork, I'm sure, right? So I think, gosh, I would have loved to have let them know that that left me with, very thankful that they did that. Very kind, very kind of them to do that.

SY: Amazing. I find it so interesting that you developed all these traits, or you really developed while you were in camp, in your thinking about how you saw yourself, how others perceived you. The acting itself is, I mean, being involved on stage. I mean, that was the foundation there.

TF: Yeah, the foundation was really from camp.

SY: But do you think that you felt more comfortable because everybody else was Japanese?

TF: It was really strange. It was really strange to see all Japanese, 'cause I really, unless I went to Sunday school, went to Buddhist church on Sundays. My world was completely a Caucasian world.

SY: So it didn't even occur to you.

TF: No. And I didn't know anything about prejudice really, I guess, until the war. Maybe my sisters may have felt it earlier, but you know when you're young and you're pampered, it doesn't matter when you're young if your parents have a lot of money or no money. And I know they went through tough times, 'cause one year I heard that my father, must have been just about when I was born, my father had, he wasn't paid for his crops for the year. And so they had very little to eat and very little to get by on. And you know those hundred pound sacks of rice with the cloth? Well, I think my mother probably took that and made outfits. Today you'd pay a lot of money 'cause it's very fashionable to have a dress out of that sack, old sack. But in those days, you surely didn't really want to show up with a dress that had a hundred-pound sack of rice or whatever it was on it.

SY: Tough times.

TF: It was tough times.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.