<Begin Segment 14>

TI: Well, and you talked about earlier another project, you call it the Heart Mountain Project.

JO: Right.

TI: Is that pretty much the focus of that project?

JO: Yes, and I called it the Faces of Courage as sort of stealing from Profiles of Courage. The stories I was getting there, I found diaries -- it's never been published -- but snippets of diaries of people who were administrators. The diary of one administrator who wrote about the arrival, and what are we doing, and the needs of, the need for coats and how people had to work to get a coat, pea jacket, a moth-eaten pea jacket indeed, and how there's a story about the sleds in Heart Mountain. Do you know that story? About the children, soon after they got there, the snow began to fall. Stanley didn't write about this. The snow began to fall, and the kids, many of them from Southern California, had never seen snow. So they made sleds out of anything: trays, pieces of cardboard, whatever. People also think that that camp was surrounded with a fence at that time. The fence had not been built. But the children, twelve or sixteen of them, were arrested because they went sliding and went outside the boundaries where the fence might be. And there was going to be a fence built because the people in Cody objected to their not being a fence. There was no plan for a fence there to begin with, and there was no fence, but the children were arrested and brought to the headquarters, and their parents had to come, and that they would arrest ten and eleven years olds for sliding in the snow. It was in a diary written by an administrator who was horrified. And then there was a story by, I interviewed LaDonna, do you know her?

TI: Yes.

JO: Her last name?

TI: I want to say Zale or something.

JO: I write to her by email. She was a girl by then, at the time, and she said that, well, she told me a story about the closing of the camp. Her father took her to witness the trains going out. But somebody else told me a story, I interviewed people in Cody about the arrival of the trains. It was told to me by a person who works at the Cody Museum. And she told me how they had gone out to see the trains, and a woman, a very elderly woman got off of the train, and it was so cold, she took her coat off to cover the canary she was carrying. That's the kind of stories I had. And I interviewed Norm Mineta about his arrival there.

TI: That's what reminded me, when you said the Boy Scouts...

JO: Yes, yes. And I interviewed Al Simpson, who was also a Scout in the camps, and they apparently met while they were boys there.

TI: So what's the status of this book?

JO: Well, surprisingly, as successful as Dear Miss Breed has been, and it's still going strong. It was published a long time ago. [Laughs] And it's won a lot of awards. Still, I have not been able to sell it because there is this problem of major publishers not selling the story that goes to a small audience, and unfortunately, it's still not going to a big audience. Libraries have been very supportive of the book, but I'm not sure they're libraries from all over, but libraries on the West Coast largely. So it's very difficult to sell a story. It doesn't matter how it's written.

TI: So we've been doing this for more than a couple hours now.

JO: Oh really? I had no idea.

TI: Is there anything else you wanted to talk about before we finish this interview?

JO: I can't think of anything that I haven't told you.

TI: Well, this was excellent. And again, it's really, I think, important, because I think people probably ask the question of you, "Why are you writing this?" And I think after hearing your story for the last couple hours, it's really clear to me how important and how personal the story is to you. Again, thank you for your work, it's excellent.

JO: Thank you very much for the opportunity to share it. My children will appreciate having this story, too.

TI: Great, thank you.

[Narr. note: You asked is there anything we didn't cover...

I talked a lot about my family but didn't make some important connections... the parallels I felt between the Eastern European Immigrant's struggles and those of the Japanese Immigrants.

When I visited Ellis Island with Ellen, I thought with gratitude of how brave my grandmother had to be to leave her home and family -- knowing she might never see them again... and how like the Japanese picture brides she was... the Issei who came to America to make a better life and the struggles of these first and second generations... to be accepted. For the Issei, the journey had to be even more frightening; to make a new life with a stranger in a strange land. And then to think of the terrible realities they had to deal with... early on... doing harsh labor to get started and then just as they were healing from the depression... the incarceration. I can never see the photo of Asano Hayami receiving the flag at Stanley's military funeral...her head bowed with grief and what had to be the weight of all that came before it.

I didn't make clear what made me so passionate about this chapter of our history... but I'm still surprised by how many people still do not know about the incarceration... I know it was because I began my work on Miss Breed in 2001, when my worse childhood fear came true as I saw the World Trade Center towers fall from our office window and in the aftermath of 9/11, anyone who looked like the enemy became suspect -- and those events made it clear that the history and lessons of the incarceration needed to be retold.

What makes stories about the incarceration important today? How about the fight over immigration policies that continue to spew out hatred toward people who work at jobs no one wants and settle for less pay, in order to restart their lives and give their children a better life...and how the recent racist threats to take citizenship away from immigrant children born in the USA? So many echoes of the past! These are connections that make the story of the incarceration resonate with the present... and why the story has to be retold to new generations.]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.