Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Joanne F. Oppenheim Interview
Narrator: Joanne F. Oppenheim
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: August 20, 2013
Densho ID: denshovh-ojoanne-01

<Begin Segment 1>

TI: Today is Tuesday, August 20, 2013. On camera is Dana Hoshide, the interviewer is me, Tom Ikeda, and we're interviewing Joanne Oppenheim this morning. We're in the Densho studio in Seattle. And just as a preface to the interview, the reason we're interviewing Joanne is you're the well-known author of two books, Dear Miss Breed and the Stanley Hayami: Nisei Son book, and it was just an opportunity when you were in Seattle to do this interview. So we're going to do a life history interview, so I'm going to actually start from the beginning of your life, and we're going to kind of walk through focusing more on your books and some of the other work you're doing. So the first question is just tell me when you were born.

JO: I was born in 1934 in Middletown, New York.

TI: And tell me, where is Middletown?

JO: Middletown is in the foothills of the Catskills. I actually grew up in Monticello. I lived all my life until I was in my late forties in Monticello, New York, which is the "borscht belt," the former "borscht belt" of New York state. It was a resort area that New Yorkers came to before there was air conditioning, airplanes, and a lot of tourism.

TI: And how did your family first go to Middletown? Why were they there?

JO: Well, they never went to Middletown. I just happened to be born there because there was a hospital.

TI: I see.

JO: But my grandfather arrived in this country in 1900, I believe, and then my father and grandmother came to America. So I always say that I'm something of a "Nisei daughter." My father was seven when he arrived, but he arrived on the East Coast, so he had the good fortune to be able to be naturalized as a young man at the same time that many of the Japanese Americans were arriving at Angel Island (and denied citizenship). But my grandfather was a baker, and he didn't settle in New York as many immigrants did. He was sent to the Catskills and he began a business. At the foot of the hills there was a sign: "No Jews and no dogs." But my grandfather always said he came into town on another road to pass that sign by. And my father grew up in the little town that we ultimately were born in, in Monticello. He went to night school with my grandmother. She spoke many languages, but he went to night school with her when he was seven years old, because my grandfather, being a baker, was out at night baking, and my grandmother couldn't leave him alone. So schooling was always very important to him. And my mother came from New York City, and they were married in 1927.

TI: Going back to when your grandfather first came to the town, and there was that sign, did your family face much discrimination by living there?

JO: No. Actually, by then, the Catskills was a place that people were sent to who had tuberculosis, who were living in the slums. And people, my (maternal) grandparents in New York were suspect of my father's family. (They feared that) anybody that lived in the Catskills probably had tuberculosis, and they weren't sure they wanted to send their daughter who was eighteen and in love with my father to live there. So fortunately that wasn't part of the reason they were there. They were there because it was a good place for him to ply his trade. My (paternal) grandmother worked in the bakery with him, and shoveled the coal in the oven, lost an eye doing it. But they prospered. (...) My grandfather liked to embroider, and I remember when I was a child, he lived with us after my grandmother died, and he embroidered a pillow with the flag that said "God Bless America." That was one of his favorite songs. He'd always have me singing that for him.

TI: And did he ever talk about what it was like... I guess the issue I'm trying to get at is maybe things like prejudice or race relationships. Did he ever talk about that, or being Jewish, anything like that in terms of what America was like for people who perhaps weren't at the top of the pyramid in terms of society?

JO: No. [Narr. note: As a child I was not aware that there was a lake 5 miles away that was restricted -- and a resort 5 miles in another direction -- also restricted, no Jews, and an active KKK in a town 15 miles away. Funny how even now I blacked that out!] And there's another way in which my relationship with my grandfather and my father, who was seven when he came here, and that was another parallel. They never spoke of the past, it was about the present. They never spoke about why came. And being so young, we didn't think to ask. It wasn't until much later that we found out why they came. The only thing my father would say was that he never would go back to Europe. He wanted to go to Asia. He went as far, he went to Mexico every winter, but he would never go back to Europe. And I remember once wanting to go to Amsterdam, and he said, "Why would you want to go there?" And I said, "Well, I want to see it." And he said, "They have bedbugs there. It's dirty." What he was remembering was really his departure, which was from Rotterdam. He was remembering the ship. The only thing I ever heard about was the trip on the ship, that he was one of the few people who didn't get sick, according to him, because his mother kept him on the deck, and they had left with hard rolls, and he ate the rolls. He didn't eat any of the food, and he was not sick. Other than that, no.

TI: Now were they leaving Europe for any particular reason? I mean, why did they leave?

JO: Oh, I'm sure they left because they couldn't make a living. My grandfather left because he was about to be drafted into the Russian army or the Polish army, they lived in Poland or Russian Poland, wherever it was. And he always said he ran away from being taken from his family. And he came to New York at least three or four years before my grandmother and my father came. My father really didn't know him. And he had had his mother exclusively to himself, he was an only child. And he had had his mother exclusively to himself, and I don't think he especially was happy to share her with his father when he got here.

TI: Oh, that's interesting. Now, did your father and your mother and I guess your grandfather, I mean, your grandparents, did they have very much family that stayed in, was it Poland?

JO: Well, yes, and of course, I know almost nothing about them. There was a brother who came at the same time as my grandfather, and they had some relationship but they didn't live in the same town. He was also a baker. But we had almost no contact with them because my grandfather didn't drive a car. My father was the first in his family to drive a car. He was the first in his family to go to college, and he trained as an engineer at RPI. And education was very important to him. And I think a sense of... well, he was too old to serve in the army, but he served as the air raid warden, he was the head of the Civil Defense, and he developed a radio system so that you could talk from cars to the courthouse. And we used to spend our Sundays going out testing how far from the courthouse we could go (and be heard on the radio).

TI: Oh, interesting.

JO: He introduced television to Sullivan County with an antenna that was twice as high as the building we lived in.

TI: So he was sort of like an electronics kind of buff.

JO: Yes. My children always say that their grandfather is on their shoulder when they're dealing with new technology.

TI: Interesting. That's a good story.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: So let's go back to your childhood, and what are some early memories of growing up in Monticello?

JO: Monticello, right. We don't put the "cello" in.

TI: Okay, Monticello.

JO: Well, cold, lot of snow. And we grew up on the main street of the town because my mother was a city girl. She came from New York, and she wasn't going to live on a side street. My grandfather was retired by then, my grandmother died when I was a year old, so I didn't know her. But we walked to school, we walked home for lunch, we knew everybody. There were three thousand people in our town, so everybody knew everybody. I always thought everybody liked everybody. I didn't find out until later that wasn't necessarily true. [Laughs] There were a significant number of Jews in our community so that they closed the schools on our high holy days. But everybody was not equally observant; there were many people who (were not). Most of our programs in school centered on Christian holidays. Of course, growing up during World War II, we were not unaware of what was happening to Jews during that time, so that there was a certain amount of fear that we lived with through that period. A fear that what was happening in Europe to Jewish children would happen to us.

TI: So talk about that. So there was actually, you felt that it could happen to you in Monticello, the same things?

JO: I know. You're saying it almost the way my brother said it. [Laughs] But I remember the day that, I remember December 7th. We were reading the comics on the floor, my father being an engineer, had a facsimile machine already. But facsimiles was sort of like ticker tape. It came in on sheets of paper with the news, and we were lying on the floor. The comics didn't come that way, they came on regular newspaper. When the news came in, I became frantic. I was terrified because we did know about the war in Europe, and I remember my brother went and got his globe, and he was four years older than I. And he showed me how far away Hawaii was, had no reason... and then he said, "And why would anybody come to Monticello anyway?" But then my grandfather in New York manufactured drapes, and he sent drapes with blackout curtains on the back of them, which were then put up in our living room and bedroom and all the other rooms of the house. And my father got so serious about civil defense that I was convinced that there must be the threat, almost it was imminent. And I had book, a history book, which showed the Revolutionary War with the soldiers lined up facing each other with their guns, the red coats, and the revolutionary troops. And I used to have this dream that that was going to happen on the main street in Monticello, and I was I would be just... it would happen right there.

TI: Now, were other families doing the same things in terms of blackout curtains?

JO: Oh, yes. Yes. And during that time, (...) when shortages started happening, my mother actually did canning, and I remember she tried to make us ketchup because you couldn't buy ketchup. And what do they call that boiler that has a steam thing on it? A pressure cooker. The pressure cooker exploded and the ketchup went on the ceiling. And we had the worst-tasting ketchup in America, but we had to eat it because that was what was available.

TI: Before we move on, I forgot a couple questions. What was your given name when you were born?

JO: My name was Joanne Fleischer. Joanne Faith Fleischer. (...)

TI: And your parents' name, just for the record.

JO: Helen Jasym Fleischer and Abe Fleischer.

TI: Okay. I'm sorry, that was part of the questions I forgot to ask.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So let's go back to... so the war starts December 7th, you are about, what, seven years old at this point?

JO: Uh-huh.

TI: And your brother you said was four years older, so he's about eleven. And he shows you where Pearl Harbor is and how far away, trying to relieve some of your anxiety. When you went to school, did people... what did your teacher say about what was happening in the world in terms of the war and things like that?

JO: Well, what I remember most is that in fourth grade, in geography class, every time they pulled a map down, she would say, "Well (...) this is a very old map." And then she would add, "And it won't be the same when the war is over." This to me was a symbol that I should not bother to learn this right now. [Laughs] So geography was not one of my fortes.

TI: What do you think the teacher was trying to say by saying, "It's not going to be the same"? I mean, the war was going to just, like, change all these countries, the boundaries, everything.

JO: Well, they had already changed from, in terms of the maps that were on the war, which were probably World War I maps that my uncle had when my father had gone to school. I was in the same school that my father went to high school in when I went to elementary school. And there was a sense everything was on hold until after the war. People kept saying... my father sold -- my father and mother both were in business -- they sold home appliances. They closed the store; there were no appliances to sell. My father moved into a little shop around the corner and repaired radios and irons and everything else that people needed to keep going through the war. And we didn't have meat on certain days, like all kids, we gathered newspapers and scrap goods. We gave up some of our metal toys and turned them in for scrap. We were very aware. It was very much involved in the home, the home front. And in school, I don't think very much was said about it. We didn't have new textbooks. I remember all of the textbooks I had were read by my uncle who lived in our little town for a brief time when my grandmother was ill. I even got some books that he had had, and he was at least twenty years older than I. And that was always explained, "This textbook is out of date. We'll have new textbooks after the war."

TI: Interesting. How about during the war? Were there any young men coming from your town or going from your town to serve in the military?

JO: Oh, sure. The grocer's son went and he was my favorite, he used to give me free cookies and piggyback rides. So I corresponded with him, he was in Greenland. My uncle was in the service, he served in the Pacific. He was in Okinawa at the end of the war. Another uncle was in the service, and my brother was almost old enough by the time the war was coming to a close, he and his friends would talk about how they were going to go into the service. My brother kept a big map with pins on it, kept track of the war.

TI: How about casualties? Were there any casualties that your town suffered?

JO: Yes, there were, and I remember that right outside my window, on the main street, they dedicated a stone with the names of two boys who were of the same family who died in battle. And I remember also during war, whenever there was a parade, the gold star mothers... I think that, in part, that's why the photograph of Stanley Hayami's mother always just grabbed me especially (...). But we marched in parades a lot, Brownie Scouts, Girl Scouts. It was a time to be patriotic, blindly patriotic, whatever else was going to happen.

TI: And as part of that patriotism, how did people perceive, I guess, both the Germans and the Japanese, the "enemy"? When you think about during World War II, let's start first with the Germans. What were people saying about the Germans during this time?

JO: Well, I remember a friend of mine... well, we just hated the Germans. We were afraid they were going to come and take us. And I remember thinking, well, I had blond hair as I was growing up, it was naturally blond at that time. But I didn't have blue eyes, and I kept thinking, "If I only had blue eyes, maybe I could pass." Imagine, seven years old, and thinking, how would I... but then I would have to be without my parents, because I was sure they couldn't pass. They had dark hair. My father was white haired by then. But there was this dreadful fear. And there were fundraisers, and there were constant stories, well, when we ate, our mothers would say, "You must finish what you're eating because there are children starving," and they weren't just in China. There were fundraising for families, to bring families here. My parents actually, my mother wanted, my mother really wanted to adopt a child at that point. There were opportunities, there was a girl across the street from where we lived who was brought here, brought to Monticello by a doctor's family from England, and she lived there during the war. She did return to her family.

TI: That's interesting. Was that common for children from England and other places where the war was going on to come to the United States?

JO: I don't know how many came from the United States. I know that many of them were adopted by or taken in by families in the English countryside, and I know that there was also the (kinder transports) trains that came out of Germany that took orphan children into their homes. They didn't know they were going to be orphaned at the time, but they suspected. So Jewish families were sending their children to England, and there were appeals to adopt children or at least give them homes for the duration in the countryside. There weren't many in our little town; it was a very small town. My parents were going through hard times during that time, there was no business. And they were concerned about... I think they reluctantly gave up the idea. I think by the time they really got the idea, it was impossible to get any Jewish children out.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: So let's move now, so we talked about sort of your perception of Germany during the war. How about Japan and Japanese? What was your sense about them?

JO: I got all of that from the cartoons and from the propaganda that was thrown at me. So that by the time I was... it was inbred in the comics and the movies. We never saw a movie that was in any way friendly to any Japanese. And there were no Japanese Americans in our community, none. There was one Chinese American in our community. And there were two African Americans in our community at the time. That's not true anymore.

TI: I'm curious, did you, by any chance, know the Chinese American family in your community?

JO: They didn't have, actually, didn't have any children, so we only knew them, there was somebody who ran the restaurant, there was somebody who ran... there was one family, but one worked in the restaurant, another had a laundry, another had a grocery.

TI: But they didn't have children going to school?

JO: No, there were no children.

TI: So this is kind of a good segue. Either right at the end of the war or right after the war, a Japanese American came to your town. So can you talk about that a little bit, who this person was and how you met her?

JO: Right. Her name was Ellen Yukawa, and her sister was Elaine, and she was slightly younger. And she arrived the first day of school, I think we were in sixth or seventh grade, I cannot remember. And at first we did not know if she could speak English, and then were shocked. She not only spoke English, she knew all the games we knew. She said that she came... I don't know that we ever asked her where she came from, but we knew that she did not come from Japan. And she never told us where she had been. And no one, it was not part of our history to know anything about the incarceration. And being as unworldly as we were, I think maybe we didn't ask.

TI: But yet you knew she wasn't from Japan, and she knew all the games that you played, so she seemed like kind of this typical American girl.

JO: Right. She was a very good student, she was very pretty, she was very friendly, she became a leader in our class. We were so happy to have new people come to our class. We lived in this very insular world. When I graduated -- I'm going to jump ahead -- when I graduated high school, there were sixty people in my class, and that was a big class. My husband's class the year before was even smaller because we were Depression babies. And so we were so ready for new faces and new people, and Ellen came as a shock to us. We didn't know where, we didn't know quite what to think about it. But the war was over, and Ellen says that the principal made an announcement. I don't remember the announcement.

TI: And do you recall what the announcement was?

JO: She recalls that the announcement was that there were two new people coming to our school, and it was on public service announcement that my father installed that sound equipment in the school, and that was how we got our news every day. And she says that he said he expected us to welcome them, and that was a sufficient notice to all of us that they were to be treated as friends. So I guess we never asked. I still don't understand how we never asked.

TI: And yet you knew that they were of Japanese ancestry.

JO: It was obvious they were of Japanese ancestry, and I think we knew they came from California.

TI: Now you got to know Ellen later on, so can you describe how she got there? She had a story of how she got to Monticello.

JO: Yes. Well, Ellen had been in Poston -- I found this out later -- Ellen had been in Poston I, and when the war ended, it was not safe for them to go back to their property. They were among the fortunate families. They had found friends, they had friends who had taken care of their property, and they could have gone home, but it wasn't safe there. And so her father decided that they would go east. And he took them by train, Ellen's mother, she tells the story of how her mother told them not to talk, but the soldiers on the train that were heading home befriended them, sang with them, played with them, and they ended up in Manhattan. They went to the Empire State Building, which is where the WRA offices were. And the only place that they could live was in a hostel in Brooklyn. And they lived there, her father, who had owned his own farm, I believe, and who, they were quite prosperous when they left. She described how he would go to work in his hat and his coat, and he was a pot and pan man in the hospital, washing pots and pans. But it was the only work he could get. Ultimately, Ellen's mother took a job as a housekeeper in Monticello, in our little town, with a very prosperous family that owned a very big house, and she brought the two girls to Sullivan County, to Monticello, and they lived in a house on Sackett Lake Road, which eventually, by coincidence, twenty years later -- maybe not twenty years later, ten years later -- my father-in-law bought, and ultimately gave to my husband and myself. And it's the house that we raised our family in, but Ellen lived in that house. I had no idea all of these cross currents were happening. She lived in that house.

TI: So the Yukawa family, so the father stayed in Brooklyn and the mother and the two daughters went to...

JO: To Monticello.

TI: Monticello.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So going back to you and Ellen, so how close were the two of you during this time period?

JO: Well, there were thirty people in our classes, that was a lot, and that would mean about twenty girls, maybe, all together. So we took all of our classes together, there was an A group and a B group, fast group and a slow group. We were in the fast group, and Ellen was one of the leaders. She was very good in sports, which I was not, so we didn't have that in common. But she was also very talented in art, and we enjoyed all the same things. There was no... was she my closest friend? No. But when she left, we really all hated to see her go. But by the time we were sophomores, I believe, in high school, her father decided it was time to go home, and they reestablished their home in California.

TI: And do you know where in California that was?

JO: It was in Central Valley (...).

TI: And during those several years as she was in Monticello, did it ever come out that she was at Poston or at a camp?

JO: Never. It was never... and, of course, nobody in our little town or in history ever mentioned anything about the incarceration. Now, there are people who are my age who say that at their tables it was discussed. It was not discussed at our table. It was not, the war was not a topic that was... my parents were not very political. In fact, one was a Republican, one was a Democrat. [Laughs] And Democratic had (their headquarters) downstairs in our building. But it was just not a topic that was discussed. And if my parents had opinions about it, I never got to ask them about their opinions. I sort of know what their opinions would have been.

TI: And what would that be?

JO: They would have been appalled. They would have been appalled.

TI: So they would have been appalled that they would have taken these Japanese Americans off the West Coast and put them in camps.

JO: Well, here we have the situation in which Jews were being put in camps, (...) the only political event that I remember clearly from my childhood, and I should have mentioned it earlier, was the day that the Warsaw ghetto fell. It was the only time that I saw my father cry. And my father, being an engineer, had a shortwave radio as most people did during those years, and he was listening to the broadcasts about the war. And I asked what was wrong, and he said, "The rest of my family is gone. I've lost my family today." We probably had lost the family long before, I'd read about the small town that he came from, and they were all rounded up and they were taken to Bergen-Belsen, which I only recently found. But one of his cousins did survive, and that's a different story. They got mail many years later from a displaced person camp from a cousin whose house they had stayed in on their way to America. And my parents sent clothing, and then they sponsored them. The husband of his cousin was a medical doctor. They came to this country and he could not practice medicine here. And it was really, he was so destroyed. One of his sons had been taken by the Russian army, which was what my (...) grandfather had escaped. But they were in that part of Germany where they were taking some of the displaced people. They never saw that son again as far as I know. Another son who was my age, or just a little bit older, came to this country with them and worked for a short time and then he was drafted. And guess where he was sent? He was sent back to peacetime Germany, and he was there for the entire time of his service.

TI: Going back, when you saw your father cry about the fall of the Warsaw ghettos, what were you thinking? Even though he kind of told you what happened, what were some of the thoughts or feelings going through you?

JO: Again, well, children think about, will they be safe and who will take care of them. It was frightening. My father could not make a living, and he couldn't be in service, he was too old. But, so he, being an engineer, volunteered to serve in the signal corps, and he trained engineers. He went away from our home, he lived in Troy, New York, which was not very far, except my mother couldn't drive, and there were gas shortages, so to get to see him, it was a very occasional thing. But he made a living, and he also felt he was, most of all he was doing something for his country. And we were proud of that as children.

TI: Going back to the time Ellen was in Monticello, you mentioned earlier that your impressions of Japanese were formed by these propaganda pieces. So how did it change by having a Japanese American in your town?

JO: She didn't look like anybody that they were representing on the screen, and she certainly didn't look like anybody that was in Superman comics, and she certainly didn't look like... she was just, she was Ellen. [Laughs] We laughed together, we played games together, we struggled with the same teachers together, and I think that I'm not sure what she would tell you about what she experienced at firsthand, or what her impressions were, but she always speaks very fondly of her time in our town.

TI: So later on, did she ever mention that there were some hardships for her family?

JO: Never, never. And I never understood why until many, many years later. When I started researching Dear Miss Breed, I actually should back up and say I really began researching Miss Breed because of Ellen.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: Yeah, so let's stay chronological and then just unfold. And if you don't mind, why don't we jump to that, in terms of, so you went to the same high school, and your little high school decided to have a reunion many years later.

JO: Fifty years later. We had had so much of each other, the same sixty people, and really it was more like thirty-five, because some of them were from out of town, so the inner circle. We had had quite enough of each other. But when we reached fifty years and still hadn't had a reunion. Someone contacted me, he was living on the West Coast, and said, "Don't you think that we should have it?" And I said, "Well, yeah, maybe." [Laughs]

TI: So this would be the fiftieth reunion of your high school graduating class.

JO: Of 1951.

TI: Okay, so this would be in 2001.

JO: It would have been a 2001 reunion, but something happened that year, so it was postponed. But it would have been that year. And I said, "I'd be willing to work on it, but how are we going to find anybody? It's fifty years." So a few of us started working with the internet and the telephone books, and with contacts. And in the midst of it all, I said, "Where is Ellen? Where do you think Ellen Yukawa is?" And everybody said, "Well, I don't know." Nobody knew where she was. And then one of our real gurus, our internet guru said, "I'm going to find her." And he couldn't turn up anybody with that name, and he lived in San Diego. [Laughs] But it wasn't Ellen's family, we found any Yukawas at all. And so I just said, "Well, I'm going to try one more path." I wrote an email to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to see if perhaps there was some way of finding Ellen. And one of her very closest friends said, "I think that she was in Arizona." So that gave me a hint. And I mentioned that in my email, and I got back an email that said, "Well, there are no lists. There could not be any lists." Well, maybe at that time there were no lists, or maybe they just felt that they... I don't know. Then I got another email from a curator who was in Japan at the time, for JANM, and she said that when she got back, she would try and help me. And lo and behold...

TI: And how did this curator when she was in Japan hear about your email?

JO: Somebody had passed it on.

TI: And do you recall her name?

JO: No. I haven't got that one... that's the one that I lost, and the email's so old I don't have it. And I wasn't yet a researcher, so I wasn't keeping things. I got an email saying that there was a Yukawa in Arizona, and her name was Elaine. I said, "I think that may be her sister," so we called that number, and sure enough, it was Ellen's younger sister who was so thrilled to hear from someone from that time, and by that afternoon I was speaking with Ellen herself. And she was thrilled that we were looking for her, and we did a lot of catching up, and she said she wouldn't miss our reunion for the world. So I felt content. But, oh, I'm missing the whole story. While I was online at the Japanese American National Museum, writing that email, I went poking around to see what kind of stories were there.

TI: So this is on their website.

JO: On their website. And, of course, by then, I did know what had happened because of redress. That was when many of us first learned about redress who didn't get it in school. And I found the story of Clara Breed the librarian in San Diego who had a whole, who actually had a group of children whom she had been the children's librarian for for many years, who felt attached in no uncertain terms, who went to the train station and gave the children postcards so that they could send her their address because they did not know where they were going. And in any case, without telling you all of Miss Breed's story, I read about the circumstances and about the letters that the children wrote to her, and how they didn't know that she was keeping those letters, and that there was a repository of letters, there were just a few samples online. And I said, "This is a children's book." By then I had written almost fifty children's books, picture books, never anything like this. I said, "How could that not be?" And I went to Amazon, and I said someone should have written this story. And I so I wrote back and asked, "How could I get the letters?" And I was told I would have to come to California, which was impossible since I was at that time having chemotherapy, and I had radiation ahead of me. And I do think this story... at that point I still didn't know enough about the incarceration, and so I started reading Roger Daniels, and I think Greg Robinson's book came out that year and I think I heard Greg doing his wonderful imitation of FDR. And I was just taken with the whole story, that how could this have happened? How did it happen? And living with a lawyer who was a great civil libertarian, he and I both began talking about this, and he helped me with the research. I was ill, but I began reading.

And in the course of events, I read Only What (We) Could Carry, and in it there was an excerpt written by Clara Breed's sister Estelle. And I said they had to be connected. And she at the time was working at Berkeley, and she was the person who was, she was so irate about the circumstances that she felt the least they could do was to give shelter while people were lining up and getting ready to go. So they arranged at the -- her father had been a minister -- and so she was very involved with the church, and they arranged for coffee and some comfort at the church as people were, one, registering, and then leaving. And I thought this had to be a relation of Clara Breed's because they were a breed apart. And indeed it was her sister.

TI: And so as a writer you're just uncovering this amazing story.

JO: Oh, one layer after another. And since I couldn't come (to California), I was given a gift. The letters were sent to me electronically on a disk.

TI: Yeah, tell me how that happened. So who took the time to digitize and send them to you?

JO: Well, the person who had digitized the letters... and I'm going blank, Snowden... Snowden is her first name and I'm going totally blank.

TI: But from the Japanese American National Museum?

JO: Yes, she was working at the Japanese American National Museum, and her project, in fact, was to digitize the letters. And so she sent me the letters, and I think I all but memorized the letters. I read them again and again. And then Steve, my husband, was a lawyer and a good researcher, showed me how I could identify what the topics of the letters were. So I started making notebooks of letters, whether they involved food or whether it involved school, or whether it involved leaving home. All of those events were then broken up so that when I began to write the book, I could find letters that spoke to various events.

TI: So it sounds like this became a really important project for you.

JO: I think that the project really gave me a will to live. I know that I wasn't sure I wanted to go through chemo and radiation, and one of the things I talked about with one of the doctors at Sloan-Kettering, which was where I was having the work done, I told him the story of this, and he said, "Well, this is a great story. You need to write it." And I think that the connection to that and my longevity are not accidental. As I worked through what people lived through, and the despair that they went through, and the hope that they held on to of a better future, it spoke to me in ways that I can hardly speak about.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

TI: Tell me a little bit about the illness you were going through. It sounds like you had cancer?

JO: Well, I had breast cancer, and my mother had had breast cancer and died of it and I'd taken care of her through it. I wasn't sure I really wanted that much to do with it, and yet, it was early, and they caught it early, and if you're going to have a cancer, I had one of the "desirable" ones, especially if it is caught early. So I was very lucky. And the work continues to be what feeds me. It's eleven years later, and I've been blessed to be here. And I think in part I thought that this was a story -- not that I had to tell it, other people were telling it -- but they were telling it in a historical way. And I wanted to tell a story that had human, the human voice in it. And I felt the letters began to do that.

And so I tried to, when I reached Ellen, which the connections were all there about the reunion, I asked her if I could interview her because I was working on this project. And actually, it was because of her that I was working on the project. And she didn't answer my form that I sent out to various people who answered my questions. She did not want to talk about it on the phone. And when she came to the reunion, she was very happy 'cause I planned a trip to the... we had it in New York, not in Monticello. Nobody wanted to go back. [Laughs] So we had the reunion and we took a class trip to the Statue of Liberty and to Ellis Island. And she said her father always promised to take them there but they never made it, so she felt that she had fulfilled his wishes. And that was when she spoke about her father a little bit, but again, she told me nothing about the fact that she had been in Poston. And that's, of course, where all of Miss Breed's children were, but they were in Poston III.

And so when I came to California after my treatments were over to do my research and my interviews, I went to visit Ellen, who lived in Central Valley. [Interruption] And for the first time she told me that the reason they never spoke of Poston and of the past was that her father told them they were not to speak of it, that the past was the past, and they were to think about the future. And in a way I related to that because of my own family's view of the past. But that she felt that she should tell me because I was writing this story of the camps and of Poston in particular. And so her story got entwined with Miss Breed's children.

[Interruption]

TI: I want to go back. So after you're finished with your treatments and you did the research, tell me, besides doing interviews, what other type of research you did.

JO: Well, we went to Berkeley, and I had been in touch with the librarians at Berkeley, and one of them said, a research librarian said every time I wrote him I would say, "Is that there?" because I didn't know how to use a finder at that point. I really was a novice in that regard. Snowden was also helping me at the Japanese American National Museum. She was still there, I think, or she may have left there by then, but she was in touch with me. She felt a kinship about this and about Stanley Hayami as well. She had also digitized the diary so that she knew his story as well, and she encouraged me to go on to that, and I sort of put that on a back burner. But she would look things up and she would say, "You really need to go to the Huntington. You need to go to this place, you need to go to that place." We went to the National Archives in Washington for some material (to read Redress testimony).

TI: And what was she pointing you to? What was she saying you need to look at? What were the things?

JO: Well, the Huntington had the Red Cross books which were not yet then in print as far as I knew. They were books of essays by students who were in Poston, and they were supposed to go out into public schools and the world, they were going to exchange them, stories about how I left my home, what it was like when I got to Poston, what it's like now, those Red Cross books are now published, and I don't know the name of the book. It's a marvelous book. And they were all written by school age children. And I was looking for writing, hoping I was going to find some written by Miss Breed's children, whose names I knew. Unfortunately they were done in Poston I, I think, and not in Poston III. But the stories were just as meaningful, they were coming from the same places, and they were coming from children of the same ages. And we would have put more of them into the book, but there was no room. [Laughs] It really became a problem of what were you going to give up -- this is always a problem when you're working with documents like this, because everything looks delicious. Everything looks on topic, on the nose, and you want to put it in the book but you can't

[Interruption]

TI: And as you were talking you kept mentioning "we," and I think you meant your husband and you were doing a lot of research.

JO: Right. My husband (...) was semi-retired by then, and he traveled with me and he really did assist me with all of the research. He would duplicate things that I found on microfilm, in fact, he read through the newspapers. If only the Densho had the newspapers online then, I might have saved a lot of time. Because staying in California to do the research was quite costly. But by then I had a commitment from Scholastic to do the book, and I had proceeded with that work with a little bit of support. But it was... he loves to investigate, he's a great student. So he was a great support to me.

TI: Well, you also mentioned earlier that he was in practice a civil libertarian?

JO: Absolutely.

TI: So this story must have resonated with him also.

JO: Oh, yes.

[Interruption]

TI: Now, did he ever talk about some of the Japanese American cases, the Korematsu?

JO: Well, we heard Fred Korematsu (speak) at, we came to an event when I was still doing my research, I think, at which he spoke. It was the last speech I think he gave at JANM, and also many of the resisters were there, and they spoke. That was when I met Yosh (Kuromiya), as a matter of fact. Yes, that was... I have two children who are trained as lawyers, neither of them practicing, but when they heard I was going to hear Korematsu, they understood why I was going to California and why Steve was taking the course, actually, Eric...

TI: Eric Muller?

JO: Yes, Eric Muller was running an institute at JANM, and we came for that. My husband was able to do that, and I was able to do research, so we worked hand in hand.

TI: Oh, excellent.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: So I want to go now back to the book, when it came out, what was the reaction to the book when it was published?

JO: Oh, it got wonderful notices, got wonderful reviews. The only criticism was it was too long. But people found the (first-person) human stories that I think that had not been in a lot of other books that spanned so much time. The Japanese American community was most supportive of it. I should go back to some of the interviews that I did. One of the people that I contacted that they put me in touch with at JANM was Babe Karasawa who introduced me to Miss Breed's children. He is a docent at the museum, and he had come from San Diego and been in Poston and knew all of the families who were involved. But he said I couldn't just call, he would make the call. One of the people I tried to reach was Maggie (Ishino) who wanted to know why I was doing those interviews and what were my qualifications for doing it.

[Interruption]

TI: But she's Japanese American?

JO: Oh, yes, she writes a column for the Rafu, and she was one of Miss Breed's children, she was a teenager at the time. And she said that when Babe testified that I was a legitimate writer, and that I had written for adults, I hadn't just written picture books, I had written on parenting issues, and that he'd had enough correspondence with me, it would be all right. So when she arrived, Steve, who had never done any interviews with me, he was running the video camera, and Babe taught him how to use it. We were both so green it was terrible, but Babe gave us our first wonderful interview of his experiences. So he became one of Miss Breed's children in the book, listed legitimately as not one of the correspondents, but one of the children.

And Maggie came in and she said, "You may not run the camera." And then she was not going to speak, and as it went along, she told me some of the most amazing stories that are in the book about how her mother had just given birth to her brother a few weeks before, maybe two weeks before Pearl Harbor. And when they came, the FBI came in the houses and tore people's lives apart shortly after the bombing, that they threw back the covers -- her mother was in bed still recovering from childbirth -- they threw back the covers as if she would have some kind of secret under those covers other than her baby brother. And Maggie also would not put a sticker on her shirt at the museum. She will never wear a sticker or a tag. And when we asked why, she told us the story of how her mother and father and the baby went on the train, but she was left with her little sister and her brothers to go on the second train, and that was taking them to the assembly center at Santa Anita, but they did not know that. They did not know how they would ever find her mother. And the guard that was standing at the train side said to her, "Where is your tag?" And she was holding her baby sister, her little sister -- she was not a baby, she was like five years old -- and she looked down and she realized her tag was gone. And he told her to stand to the side, and Maggie was trembling. She was a seventeen year old girl with three other siblings to take care of, but she was the eldest, she was to take care of them. And ultimately she discovered that her little sister had taken (the tag), the tag fell off, but from that day on she never (voluntarily) wore a tag. While she was in Santa Anita (she) was the one that (washed) the diapers, there were no disposable diapers. She was the one who did the family laundry, she was the one that had to go looking for milk for the baby because her mother was ill.

TI: So she had these powerful stories, and yet, when you went to go interview her, she didn't want to be recorded. I mean, it seemed like there was lot of hesitation on her part. Why was that?

JO: I'm not sure that she had ever told those stories before, or to whom she had ever told them.

TI: But she was willing to tell the story, she just didn't want to be recorded telling the stories?

JO: (We were able to record her voice, but not on film.) I think that she, in the course of events, as we spoke, she came to understand that I was there to make a record of what had happened, and that's why I think what you're doing here is so important. That if we don't make a record, that these stories will be lost as the stories of my youth, of my family's past are lost. My father never told his stories, and we never thought to ask him to tell those stories. And maybe he was too young to be able to tell those stories, but she had a sense -- and years later, after the book came out, the San Diego Library got a grant to have a play written based on the book. And Maggie and her sister were in the audience when many of the words of her story were told through drama. It was not just a recording of the letters, but it was of the events of the oral histories, because we had made a drama of it. And she was a star that night. But it was a very sentimental story, and Ellen and her sister were there, too, as well.

TI: And what did they tell you after the play? I mean, what kind of reaction did they have? Because you essentially brought their stories, brought it out in the open for other people to know. How did they feel about that?

JO: I think they were moved by that. (...) Their stories were going to be shared, that the secrecy or the shame, which I think was involved... from my research it was clear that part of not telling means that if you're accused of something, you might be guilty of something and that was part of why the stories were not to be shared, too. That was part of it. There was also the other part of it, which was the anger which had been buried and glossed over for, I think, for the sake of being able to go on. How else could you go on? So they had made a new life for themselves.

TI: So it was almost like a release or taking a weight off of them.

JO: Right. And I felt that it wasn't... when I was doing the next story, the Hayami story --

TI: Well, before we go there, I want to ask you, when you see that happening, where you've helped people tell their story, and it is this real positive reaction, how do you feel about that? What does it make you feel to see that happen?

JO: Well, as a storyteller, you listen to hours and hours of stories, and then you get some kernel of something and you say, "Ah. That will move. That takes the story forward." You keep looking at the same story and you think you've got them all, but yet, you keep getting a different light, you know. It's how you turn the camera. And that every time you get one of these stories that tells a personal experience, what that felt like, then you feel like you've done something. It has nothing to do with having a bestseller or making a lot of money, it has to do with putting history on a page or on a screen, on an internet screen, because I'm afraid the pages are going the way of the world. But these stories should not be lost, because if they are lost, I mean, we live in a time in which we're seeing that this can all happen as quickly as a snap of the finger.

TI: And just to kind of finish up with Dear Miss Breed, so how's the book doing now?

JO: It continues to be sold; it continues to be read, happily. It continues to have a following. And I still get mail from time to time, and I don't always get mail, sometimes I get a comment on the internet, someone that has read the book and passed it on because... or someone who's doing research and wants to know, "How did you get that?" The people with whom I spoke were all very forthcoming, including Maggie. Ishino, Maggie Ishino. I finally got the name. [Laughs] I-S-H-I-N-O. And that makes me very happy, too, because we like to feel that our own work continues on, or inspires somebody else to move it on to the next place.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: And I wanted to go back to a name that you mentioned in the first part, Snowden. So we went back and looked in the book, Snowden Becker. So she worked at the Japanese American National Museum, and she was the one who provided lots of help. She sent you the digitized versions of the diary, or not the diary, but the letters, and then she also told you about another story, the story of Stanley Hayami.

JO: Yes. While I was online looking and seeing Miss Breed's story, I also saw some of the images that Stanley Hayami had written, and in that same book -- All They Could Carry, I've forgotten the exact title of that book, but there were excerpts of the diary in there as well. But the entire diary was not digitized online. But some of the art was there, and it was very awkward, even when they got the diary up online, it was one page at a time, but it was not necessarily in sequence. (...) When I finished with Miss Breed, I was floundering for a while, what am I going to do, and there wasn't any question that somebody needed to do that story, no one had done it.

And again, I went back to Babe, I think, who put me in touch with Walter Hayami, who was the only sibling that I could reach, and he was the younger brother of Stanley. And I asked if he would be interested, if I could interview him. I was working actually on a book about Heart Mountain, I was interviewing people from Heart Mountain, and that's how that came to be. Walter told me that his parents had given Stanley's diary to the museum for safekeeping, that they never wanted anyone to make money on it, and fortunately, nobody has. But that he wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the diary. And I said, "Well, all by itself, the diary is a historic document. But young people don't know the setting, and they don't know the history, and they can't jump into it," I thought. So I wanted to know more about the family, and I wanted him to share with me. And at some point I asked him whether or not there were any letters his family had written while he was in the army. And he said, well, there were, and they were in his garage, and he hadn't looked at them in years, and he would look for them. Well, as it was, I think it was Miko, his wife, who helped him find those letters. Because about six months, maybe eight months later, I actually received photocopies of the letters.

TI: Before we go to the letters, going back to Walter, when he thought back to his brother, his older brother Stanley, so Stanley, his diary was pretty much during the war, before and during the war, and then his letters you're talking about were during the wartime when he went into the military?

JO: Right, but the diary doesn't begin until November of 1942. He started writing, the war had started, Stanley was already, had been incarcerated, did not write about the assembly center. He did not write about... he didn't write very much about, even about the beginning of the war. There's a little of that in the diary. So he does write about that time, but the surround is not there. Where did they live, where did they go to school, what did they do? There are hints of where he went to school because he's in correspondence with some of his friends.

TI: Well, and the big contextual thing that you bring out really well in your book is he was killed in action in Europe.

JO: Yes.

TI: And going back to Walter, so was it a very painful thing for him to talk about his brother, or how did he remember or discuss his brother?

JO: He and Stanley were just a few years apart, and they had had the longest time in camp together because their older siblings had left. And it was painful; it was painful to talk about. His wife had also lost a brother in the war. And so the two of them, you had a sense that the two of them had shared this terrible loss together, although they had not been in the same camp. They didn't know each other during the war, they met afterwards. They were young teenagers when the war ended. Stanley was only nineteen when he died, and he died just days before the war in Europe ended. He was in the last offensive battle that the 442nd fought. But the research, no one had really researched what had gone on for Stanley when he left camp.

The business of getting in touch with the people that Stanley knew, who show up in the diary, was also very difficult. Most of them were gone. And that's always been my problem with doing this research, I'm late. And my rush was to reach as many people as possible. I did find one of his classmates who turned out to be an artist, in part inspired by Stanley and his sister. It was always Stanley's desire to be a writer and an artist, and he was drawn and quartered because his brother wanted him to be an engineer or an architect, something "sensible." And Stanley was an artist dreamer, so his diary is very moving in that regard. He was not a very political person, his brother is much more political. But he's older, and that separation, the three, four year difference between Nisei who were already in college, and who had their lives, who were on the brink of going out into the world to start their careers, whose careers and lives were turned upside down, for them, it was so much different than for the kids who were still in camp. And I found that to be true in Miss Breed as well.

There was something about Miss Breed that I would like to recall, and that is that the letters to Miss Breed were all full of sunshine. They were, they never complained. They knew to whom they were writing. It wasn't that Miss Breed wouldn't have taken their criticism or the harshness, but they and Stanley put a gloss on things. They did not speak in the same way that Stanley's older brother Frank did when he wrote years later about his life as a prisoner of his own country.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: And going back to Frank, so how did you see Frank's writing? Where did that show up?

JO: Ah, that was interesting. When I was in... I went to Wyoming to visit Heart Mountain, I looked at the archives, not just of the camp, but of the historian... I'm going to go blank on the name again. A young historian who was... he's written three books, and he had a collection of letters that he gathered while he was doing his research, and I'll have to find the name of that person. (Narr. note: It was Mike Mackey. It was his gem of a letter from Frank Hayami that gave texture and tone to the story.) And he shared those stories with me, and in fact, he gave me permission to make copies of all of those letters, and all of those letters were like oral histories, written histories of my past by people who volunteered to give him that material. And among those letters was this amazing letter from Frank Hayami. And the letter, the letter begins with words that I really hope would be used in the film, and unfortunately, that part of it didn't get in, there wasn't room. But Frank says that his father gave all of the children two names, an American name, because he wanted them to be all-American. And he gave them a Japanese name because he feared that they might one day need to have it, because they might need to go back to Japan. And it was evident at that time, when Frank and his sister Sach went to Berkeley in 1941, Frank was about to graduate with an engineering degree Sach was just starting hers. Her name was Grace, but she was always called by her Japanese nickname. And Stanley sends them a letter, which we didn't have until -- I'm getting this a little ahead of time -- we didn't have when I was writing the book, that letter was found later, in which Stanley writes that he's sending her two hundred and fifty dollars from Pop, and Frank had gotten the same two hundred and fifty dollars because they feared in November that their funds might be frozen. Because the United States was taking action on trade, and they figured that this was going to happen. And that way they would have money to... and the family would have money if they needed it, and in fact their funds were frozen. There was also a letter (that was written) the day after Pearl Harbor saying, "Please come home."

TI: And this was a letter from who?

JO: This was a letter from Stanley to his sister to please come home, that it won't be much of a Christmas here. And it's a very brief letter, (...) but Stanley also writes in his diary about the day that the war began and how they heard the news on the radio, and how their aunt, who lived in L.A., whose husband was a Packard dealer, I believe, a big successful car dealer, had been taken away, and this was his father's sister, and how she needed the family to come and be with them. And so they moved to L.A., and that's why they were sent to Heart Mountain. They lived in San Gabriel -- Gabriel, I think was in California -- it's funny how you say words that you read, and when you say them out loud... [Laughs]

TI: And then people correct you, like, "We don't say that"?

JO: Of course, right.

TI: We have that problem in, especially in Seattle.

JO: So they moved there, and they left their business, and they rented it to a garden center across the road, and it got pennies on the dollar, but their property was held, they rented their property. And the family ultimately was able to move back, so like Ellen Yukawa's family, they were among the fortunate few families that were able to return to their own property. It was not in very good condition (...).

TI: So all of this sounds like you did a lot of research into the family, lots of information.

JO: Well, yes, and then the only way I could get the information about what was going on when Stanley was in the army, I didn't know about... there were letters to his father and mother and brother, the family wrote, in addition to writing the diary, and those letters I was privy to. Those were letters from Europe, they were from basic training, but they were few and far between, and they were written to parents. And those letters are protective of his parents; he doesn't worry about them as much. He requests things as a kid would, he was eighteen when he was drafted. And incidentally, Stanley's cousin -- I'm going to go blank on the name again -- Stanley's cousin (Paul Nakadate) was one of the leaders of the resisters.

TI: At Heart Mountain?

JO: That's correct. And he writes in the diary that he understands their point of view. But he thinks that when Uncle Sam calls, he will go.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

TI: So let's go back to the writing of the book, and we talked a little bit about the primary source materials that you used for the book, the diary, these letters that he wrote to his parents and other siblings.

JO: Right.

TI: And it was really from that, I guess, first wave of primary sources that you wrote the book because that was all that you had.

JO: Right. And my history that I had learned about the incarceration, I was able to write a little bit about that, because Stanley wrote so little about the assembly center, I was able to flesh that out a little bit because Frank wrote about the assembly center and how his degree was thrown on his cot and came in the mail, and what that was like. But I also had access to one of his classmates, I interviewed him. And then in the army section I knew what... I thought I was going to be able to find his army records. But lo and behold, the archives for the 442nd, many of them burned in Texas. So I couldn't even find out anything about the battles, I had to go look for information about the battles.

And one of the things that came up was that Stanley was killed in the battle for San Terenzo, which is in Italy. And as I was reading about that, there was something very familiar about the name San Terenzo, and I thought, "I read about this battle before." And sure enough, it came to me that I had read about it because Senator Inouye had been wounded in that battle, and I had read his account. Among the many accounts I had read his account of the battle in which he lost his arm. So I contacted some of the veterans that, many of the veterans I spoke to, and I said, "Isn't there anybody in Stanley's battalion who would remember him or who would have stories about him?" And someone told me that everybody in his group was dead, and that one person who had remembered it remembered it, but he was no longer alive, and there was no way I was going to get that story. And then I said, "Well, what about this battle of San Terenzo? Who was there? What battalions were there? What groups were there?

And then somebody said, the editor, who was working on the book with me at the time, said -- and he was a great World War II buff -- he said, "I bet that if you wrote to the Senator, he would know about it. I bet he knew Stanley." And I said, "Well, come on. That's not gonna happen." But the museum was giving me the material, I was in touch with them, and Irene Hirano was still at the museum. And I said, "My understanding is that Stanley was in..." and I gave her the company name and all of the rest. I said, "Is there some way I can contact the Senator and ask him about this?" She said, "Well, he's coming here this weekend," he was coming for a dinner. She said, "I'll show him the picture." And, of course, he saw the picture and he said, "Of course, I knew him." He said he recognized the smile on his face from the picture that we all had of Stanley at that time. And I should have pursued that further, but I asked if he would write about him, and he agreed to write the forward to the book and talk about the fact of... well, we knew the facts of his battle, we thought we knew all of it. And so he gave me that, and it was in the course of events that I discovered -- the book was about to go to press -- that I discovered that the Senator was the leader of Stanley's battalion. That's not a very large group, it's a rather small group.

TI: So I'm sorry, he's the platoon leader?

JO: The platoon leader, right, of the platoon. Thank you.

TI: A platoon's about twenty men.

JO: At the very most. He was the platoon leader, I was saying battalion, but platoon is correct. And that Stanley had to have been with him when he was injured, he had to have been with him in the first assault when they had to sneak up on the Germans to take the mountain. And the story of that battle has been written about at great length by veterans who were there, yet I could find no veteran who remembered Stanley. And one of them explained that so many people had been lost, that the old-timers as they called themselves, who were all of twenty and twenty-one, would not make friends with the replacements who came. I'm sure you've heard this before, that they had had such losses, they were afraid to make friends with anybody. So the young replacements were pretty much unto themselves. And it was not surprising that few of them knew Stanley.

Years later, in fact this year, after the Senator's death, there was a recording of an oral history -- again this is what makes these oral histories so important -- there was a recording made by the Senator late that told stories that are not told in other retellings of the events of his injury, which I had read at great length. There's a collection of all the people who won the Medal of Honor and their stories. But he tells the story of having been in the first wave of going up and surprising the Germans who were to be taken by surprise, so that men who fell had to be silent so as not to be overheard or give away their location and the surprise of their attack. And Stanley was there. I always thought that from the accounts I had heard from other people, that there was a second wave and Stanley's group was with that wave, but apparently not. And then in that interview the Senator recounted how the people of -- he went into the town, not San Terenzo but the town before San Terenzo, on their way to San Terenzo, that the people of the town, they took over the churches and military headquarters, and that the elders of the town came with food and with thanks to them that night, and offered them their daughters. And the Senator, who was then twenty years old, said, "I have sisters. I don't want your daughters." And the next day he recalled how they left the town and they were showered with flowers by the town, as they left the town. He tells the story better than I can tell the story, and it's not Stanley telling the story, but Stanley was writing letters. And at that same time, this story was not in my book because we didn't know the story. And I regret, I already regret not having interviewed him in person, but he was third in line to the President at the time and wouldn't have had the time to tell me that story, I'm sure. I wouldn't have presumed to ask him to take the time.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

JO: But at the same time, Stanley was writing letters that I had never seen. And it wasn't until after the book actually had gone to press that I discovered that his sister had a cache of letters that she and Stanley had exchanged. All of the letters that Stanley wrote to her, plus the letters she had written to the family. And in that collection was also a very short diary. She had sent him a small diary book that she had requested while he was in the service. I think he did not understand that he wouldn't be allowed to keep a diary. But on the ship going to Europe, and when he left New York, he recalled the time, his time in the army in ways that the letters simply don't tell. And about eating at Miyako's and going to see Oklahoma! and visiting his sister and where she lived, which happened to be on a street, adjacent to a street where I worked forty years later.

TI: In New York City?

JO: In New York City. And then Sach's letters to her family are also amazing because her letters tell about what it was like to be a young Japanese American woman who left camp. We know that many of them went out to work, to go to school, and she had to do both.

TI: So I'm guessing as a writer, you're just thinking, oh, all this rich material is coming to light after you essentially finished the book.

JO: The frustration is immense. Because her story... it puts, again, it turns that light in another direction and focuses on material that would have enriched the telling in the book. I had to use other families, other people's accounts as opposed to Hayami family accounts. And it tells me a great deal about what young Japanese American women, young Nisei women, were going through. I mean, she worked for a doctor's family in order to have a place to live, and the impositions were great. She was expected to take care of their children, to cook, to wash, to do everything, and to go to school. And the school situation was not great for her either. And her family, she felt guilty about her family, and she could not go home easily -- not home, she could not go back to camp to see them. So she was constantly buying things for them, and doing them things for them as much as she could. And Stanley's letters to her were written in a different voice than the letters to his parents, because he could write in slang to her. She was his big sister, and she was always there for him. She could always tell him, he gave him advice on what courses to take. She sent him art materials, she supported his desire to be an artist and a writer. She wanted to be a clothing designer, so they were kindred souls.

TI: I'm sorry, now, were you ever able to talk with her?

JO: Unfortunately, her husband had a stroke and she was in an automobile accident. She's still alive, and she's in a nursing home. And her daughter found the letters in the garage of her home -- no, in a closet, in a closet in her home. But her mother would never speak with me. She was in and out of... I'm not sure that she totally could have spoken to me. I've never been able to get quite whether she doesn't want to or she can't. I think she couldn't, for physical reasons, but maybe also for such emotional reasons. This letter, the diaries, the artwork that was in the yearbook, the original artwork, was on a shelf in her closet. Her little brother's family was very dear to her. He was not her littlest brother, she had a big brother, and then she had Walter, her younger brother, who was always there for her. And Walter has passed away, but Sach is still alive in a nursing home, but I'm not sure that she would approve that there's a book. It's one of my great regrets, that I could not meet her, because I admire her so much for all that she did. She was the only daughter, but she was a true daughter in the sense of caring for them. She went shopping for fishing rods for her father, and she didn't smoke, but she sent the cigarettes home to him when she wanted. She went shopping all over for fabric for her mother, and the right crochet yarn for her mother, and the right needles to crochet with. She was constantly on the go and taking care of their needs as much as they could, as they were for her. And some of the letters that Stanley wrote while she was in college and while she was away are wonderful because he took dictation from his father and he would write them the way his father spoke them.

TI: That's good. Now, those letters, what did the family do with them? Where are they now?

JO: Well, I encouraged them to give them to the museum so that they would be together with his diary. Sach's daughter had to go to court to get the letters, to get to allow other people to read them legally, and then she gave them as a gift along with a short diary to JANM so they would be with the diary, with the original diary. I digitized them, I couldn't work with them unless I digitized them, but they're not online anyplace yet. And they really, they're wonderful. He did illustrations in his letters, so he has pictures of himself in uniform that's way too big. [Laughs] And then he tells stories about basic training and what that was like. He had a sense of humor; Stanley had a great sense of humor.

TI: Good, okay.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

TI: So I want to go back to the book. So tell me about the reaction to the book, when the Stanley Hayami book came out.

JO: Well, it hasn't had a great circulation because I could not find a publisher that wanted to take it up. [Interruption] So I decided that perhaps if there was a film, that that would bring young audiences to a book, because getting them to a longer story, I had hoped would be done by the film. But the film has -- although I helped to write the film, I wrote a good part of the film, and the film is based on my research -- the film has a different title than the book, and there is no connection. Well, there's a line that goes by very quickly, but the California Civil Liberties project gave me the funding for the book and then the funding for the film, or partially for the film. It was not enough, we had to raise funding elsewhere as well. So the film didn't quite do it for the book, and I think the book will go out of print very soon, as so many of these stories do, but it's there. I don't know what else to say.

TI: So here's a question in terms of your, how you're received in maybe the Japanese American community telling these stories. It sounds like you've received excellent cooperation with institutions like the Japanese American National Museum, and I'm just curious of how, what the reaction has been with the community in terms of your writing. In particular, I think the Dear Miss Breed, which has gotten a lot of publicity, it's a well-known book, and are people surprised that, one, you're not Japanese American, or you're on the East Coast, or what are some of the things that you've come across?

JO: Well, people want to know why, what brought me to it. And I think you can tell from my life story that there are a lot of connections, there are parallels. They are not the same, no, I was never in a camp, and there are people that said how could I be writing about this since I was never in a camp and my family was never in a camp. I think you don't have to have been in a camp to understand, or to be able to write about -- I'm not writing about me, I'm writing from the voices of people who were there. And true, people are telling me stories, some of the stories are coming as long distance memories, but Stanley's story was immediate. It was from an immediate time, and so were the Breed letters. They are keeping those stories alive. So how do people react to that?

TI: Maybe this is the question I'm asking or wondering about: do you bring maybe a different perspective? I mean, by not maybe being in the community, and either going through the experience or having a close friend or family member go through the experience, that you can see the experience in a different way that helps tell the story? Does that make sense? It seems like, again, your books perhaps tell the story in a different way.

JO: Well, I think that the problem has been that the story hasn't always been told, even within the community. Just as my grandfather didn't tell me all the horrors of his life and why he left in a hurry -- I learned that much later -- but I did not... and I think Ellen's father is not telling, telling them not to hearken to the past, that as a result, there's another generation that doesn't really know its story, or at least not everybody's. I'm sure there were people in the community who know the story who maybe don't want to share it, because they don't want their children burdened with that story. Just like there are Jews who don't want their children to know about the Holocaust. I mean, when is it appropriate to tell children about six million people being burned? I understand not being able to tell it, and I think that that's part of why it's so important to tell the story from various points of view, and that maybe being outside of it, I can write about it in a way that embraces the history, and I try to give as much factual history as well, maybe to the point of boredom to some, but not to wash over the anger, not to wash over or gloss over the pain. One of the things that struck me as people told me their story, was the courage of the Issei and how little we knew about the Issei. I think because of the way they were, everyone was portrayed, the Japanese were portrayed to us as young people, would not have expected the kind of families that Japanese American children experience, the kinds of fathers and mothers they had, the fathers and mothers who bought them uniforms, Scout uniforms in camp, who encouraged them to sell war stamps, stamps for the war bonds, and who encouraged them to be busy with Scouts. Those were the stories that need still to be told so people understand that life was different, but yes, they were warm and loving families here.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<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.