<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Wow, so while this is going on, going back to your father, so he saw all this happening, and especially with the, I guess the rioting at the school, this disturbance at the school, he must have felt concerned about what the outside world was like.

KG: Well, that was it. All the news that trickled back to the camp was pretty negative. And for that reason, he decided he's gonna stay put. He had no intention of going to Japan or anything like that, but he felt it was too dangerous to be outside, and so he was gonna just sit the war out, was what he planned to do.

TI: And as part of that, his thinking, going back to the "loyalty questionnaire," so he decided to not fill out question twenty-seven and twenty-eight.

KG: Right.

TI: From what I gathered from the research, if you said no to either one of those questions or both, or didn't answer, you were then kind of placed in this category of, well, we're gonna put you in a category that is a group that is, perhaps that is more suspicious. Is that kind of what happened to your father?

KG: Well, I don't think he worried about that a whole lot. It's just that he felt the need to stay and not go out because what was going on outside. There was no problem with me, I registered, I was a "yes-yes" from the beginning.

TI: Well, there was so much confusion, because people answered, the way they answered the questionnaire, there were so many different reasons. I mean, they call it a "loyalty questionnaire," but it really wasn't necessarily based on necessarily whether or not they were loyal or disloyal to any countries.

KG: No, I don't think many people thought in those terms. It was just a label put on us after the fact, and that I found troublesome, especially when I left camp. The moment you said you were from Tule Lake, that meant you were automatically disloyal, and that really hurt.

TI: I'm going to ask you more about that later. But going back to the feelings when the "loyalty questionnaire" first came out, so your father decided not to answer, you said you registered "yes-yes" and did all that. Were there lots of discussions amongst people about how they were dealing with this?

KG: Yeah. Well, there was a tremendous repercussion, and I guess there must have been more people from Tule Lake who had questions, and that's when more people refused to answer more than any other camp, and this is one of the reasons why Tule Lake was selected as the desegregation center. It was also on the West Coast. But I think of all the ten camps, there were more people from Tule Lake who questioned.

TI: Now, so for you who kind of lived through this, why do you think Tule Lake had the highest number of people who either didn't answer or said no to those questions?

KG: I don't know why. But you know, there's so much emotion involved that people just get so involved and get influenced by other people.

TI: So yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit. So what was the process that most people at Tule Lake went through? Was it a private sort of decision that people made in their apartments and the barracks as families, or were there, like, community discussions?

KG: There were block... yeah.

TI: So describe that. How did it work?

KG: Well, there were a lot of block meetings and whole camp meetings, people getting together in mess hall and shouting. But the Isseis were really concerned in terms of if they had voted no, why that would have meant that they were stateless, because they were rejected by... they couldn't become citizens. And if they turned down Japan, even though they weren't planning to go to Japan, why, that left them up in the air. And that was a big concern among the Issei group, and I can understand their feelings.

TI: And during these block meetings or larger camp meetings, were people talking or arguing for both sides, that some people were saying you should say "yes-yes" and some people were saying "no-no," or was it mostly on one side of the discussion?

KG: Well, I think there was a combination of both. Depends upon whether, how angry you were, I guess.

TI: And it's such a divisive topic. For those who said, argued for "yes-yes," were they Isseis or Niseis who were doing that?

KG: Well, the "yes-yes" would be more Niseis, because very few of us intended to go to Japan. I think the Kibeis, who were the other, they were more inclined to register as the Isseis did.

TI: Now at this point, when the "loyalty questionnaire" came out, did the JACL have a presence in this discussion?

KG: Yeah, well, they were pro-American, and pushed for us to go along with what the government was saying.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2015 Densho. All Rights Reserved.