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TI: And just a little bit, because in your notes you mentioned how the family were in different camps and things like that during the war?

RW: Yeah. My dad gets picked up early, so he ends up in Rohwer. So a lot of his immediate early family ends up in Rohwer with him, and I don't know all the details of how that occurred.

TI: But at this point, was he married to your mother?

RW: Not yet. Well, actually, I'm not sure. I think not yet, because I think they got married out of camp. And then they were there, my mom, because my grandfather and her father was not well, comes back to the Bay Area to be with him. And so they end up at Topaz, and then my brothers, half brothers end up at Tule, 'cause they go "no-no."

TI: Got it, okay. So they were quite a bit older, then. They were, like, in their twenties, or how old were they at that point?

RW: Yeah, they would be adults, young adults. And they were both remarkable but very different.

TI: So we have Rohwer, Tule Lake and...

RW: Topaz.

TI: Topaz, okay.

RW: And then I don't know exactly, but my parents told me I was carried into Manzanar, they visited.

TI: So who was at Manzanar?

RW: I'm not sure, if they were just friends, because all the L.A. people were in Manzanar, they had friends, because they came out of L.A. So I really suspect that... see, and my dad was Nihonjinkai and kenjinkai and all that stuff, so I'm sure he had plenty of...

TI: When you said he was picked up early, was that by, like, the FBI?

RW: Yeah. Much like the Buddhist priests, because he was an officer in those other organizations, he was no priest, but...

TI: So did he have to go to any of the DOJ camps?

RW: Justice camps? Not that I know of, not that I know of. I can only trace him back to Rohwer.

TI: Okay. Actually, we have records, I could probably, after this, go back and take a look to see.

RW: Oh, that would be interesting if you do find out. Because even though I did all that JACL stuff, there was stuff... I didn't have time, actually, to kind of jump into it. I accompanied some friends that did it, and I know that they found some surprises. After they were surprised, I got like, maybe I don't even want to know.

TI: Yeah, I talk to Roger Daniels quite a bit, and when he was teaching at UCLA, he would help students do research, and they would find out things that weren't told to them, and in some cases, how devastating that was to some of them.

RW: I can understand, even like in the JACL world came the stories, like, "I was there, but I'm not documented there." "What?" and he was living through someone else's identity because he was a bigamist.

TI: Right, right. You have all these sort of hidden community secrets.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.