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TI: Yeah, so you were, okay, so you were, it sounds like about nine months old when the war started.

JM: Yes.

TI: And maybe about a year old when...

JM: When we were sent to the camps.

TI: Sent to the camps. So let's pick it up there in terms of as much as you know about what happened.

JM: Nothing, I have no memory of it. On one of my books there is a very rare photograph of me as a child in the camps, and it's the cover of my latest book. And how they snuck in the cameras and were able to take photographs like they did, and how they were able to be so creative with paint and being able to do so many artistic things is quite miraculous to me. And I do remember being told, and, of course, received Dorothea Lange's photos of the children in camp pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And many, many Issei had to be informed that their Nisei sons who had served in the 442nd and other regiments were killed in the camp while they were in the camps. So while their children were serving in the U.S. Army, they were being incarcerated as suspicious citizens.

TI: I think earlier you mentioned that your mother, up until a certain point, never really talked about the camps.

JM: My mother would never talk about the camps, and she was cursed with a daughter with great curiosity, and who's a writer, and I wanted to know all about that, and she would just simply change the subject. And I kept asking her, "What happened? How did you feel?" And the one thing that she did talk about a lot, because Japanese, especially Nisei, believe in ganbatte, you know, don't whine, don't complain. But the one thing that she was not shy about complaining about was her mother-in-law, my grandmother on my father's side, because they had to live in the same barrack as my father's parents.

TI: Yeah, so explain that. So finally you found out a little bit more information. So your parents and you lived with your father's parents, your grandparents?

JM: Yes, there were, I think, five or six of them in one barrack, in one room. And my father, I think -- and again, this is vague because I could never get a real stream of the thread of weaving our history -- but my father went out and I think she was planting potatoes, harvesting potatoes as part of the labor that people were forced to do, and we were in Rohwer, Arkansas, camp. And for some reason he was -- and I don't really quite understand this part of the history, but for some reason he was released a little bit earlier and went to Chicago apparently to find us a place to stay, and actually started a Buddhist church.

TI: So was he ordained as a Buddhist minister?

JM: No, no, he was not a minister, but he helped organize the community to create a Buddhist church.

TI: Oh, how interesting.

JM: Yes.

TI: And going back to camp, did your mother, when she started talking about the camps, did she ever talk about how difficult it was raising or caring for an infant in camp?

JM: No.

TI: Because I was just thinking, boy, that must have been difficult without a washing machine.

JM: She never complained about that part of it. I think from what my cousin tells me, that I used to be their doll. So I was kind of like their plaything, I was a year old, I was cute then, and so they'd curl my hair and do all this stuff. And so when you see my photograph on the book cover, you see them a little bit ticked off because I just got my hair curled. [Laughs] And I think the way they survived was to be able to do that, the women were able to do that with each other, they were able to come together and to perm each other's hair or to curl each other's hair, you know, like create their beauty shops, to create their own gossip circles, and they created community. And I think that that's what kept them strong, is that sense of community. And even though we were separated, my maternal grandparents were at Amache, and some of my cousins were raised in Tule Lake, so we were scattered to different camps.

TI: So a real separation of the family.

JM: It's the Japanese American Diaspora. And I think that that is, that's how I analogize or liken -- I mean, there's nothing like slavery, I cannot compare it to slavery, but I do believe that is what happens in communities when you separate families, when you separate communities, that it becomes, it weakens the community and it weakens the family. So the traditions, the rituals, the family ties, the religions, the sources of strength and spirituality that keep a community bound together is broken. And I think that that's what happened to... you know, when my husband, Cecil Williams and I, he is an African American, his grandfather was a slave. He says he's actually an ex-slave. But his family talks about many things in which I find similar strains. When people are segregated they are weakened, when they are segregated and separated they are easier to divide from the community, from the total community. It's easier to exclude them.

I analogize everything to today because I think there's always a connection with history and the present. And like today's ghettos, what we call ghettos or poor communities, are like concentration camps. They bus the children in and bus the children out, they're separated, they had inferior education, they are not given the same opportunities, they don't have the same supplies, their schools are falling apart, the teachers are not well-paid. So I analogize that to what happened to us. And even though we may have had the kind of anger and the kind of culture that forced us into, well, we're not going to complain about it, we're going to just dig our heels in and work harder, I think that that's, it's not a racial issue, I think it's much more complex than that. Because I think with African Americans, slavery was so severe, there was such a separation, there was such a generational discrimination like look at what's happening today with Black Lives Matter, and look what's happening every day in our streets in every city throughout the country, young people are being shot, and they're mostly people of color and African American specifically. So I would say that -- and even today, my analogy is with the Muslim community. When Donald Trump can say, "Let's incarcerate Muslim Americans," like Roosevelt did with Japanese Americans, to me that is obscene. It's an obscenity. And I'm so glad, I think it's Anna Roosevelt, who is President Roosevelt's granddaughter said, "It was wrong then, it's wrong now, and how dare Trump do that?"

TI: Yeah, because I think Trump was saying how, well, if FDR was a pretty good president and he put Japanese American in camps, so maybe it wasn't such a bad deal.

JM: "It's not a bad idea."

TI: And that's when she came out and she said, "No, it was a mistake."

JM: It was a huge mistake. It was unconstitutional, and it was criminal in my eyes. And with all of the border debates about immigration, and now saying, okay, we're not going to let Syrians into the country, and millions of people are dying and starving and just waiting for some respite, and we're closing the borders, we're becoming more and more a box. We're boxing ourselves in.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright (c) 2016 Densho. All Rights Reserved.