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NO: Anyway, we've been on the road for two years and ten locations, and the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition is literally a coalition. It's not Friends Of, it's not a club, it's not a committee, it's a political group, per se. But in the group are people who have a lot of talent. We have lawyers, we have communicators, graphic artists, we have scholars, they have engineers to design this exhibit. So my role is very minimal, I am the least important person on this committee because I don't do any of those things. But I represent the group because I probably... this is what happened. They wanted a president, or needed one because we were incorporated, became a nonprofit, you have to elect officers. And everybody's sitting on their hands in a big circle. These are very busy people. And I thought about it and I said, you know the word giri, duty? Okay, I'm busy, too, but not... this is our story. It's about the Japanese, German and Italians, this is our story. I can't shy away from it. And some people said, "Well, you're so busy with the diary," which was very difficult. I told my sister, because I didn't finish it when she passed, I said, "It will be done, I promise you that." So it's done.

So Tuna Canyon is here, Tule Lake is here, but it intersects, because I am going to do a talk. Because a lot of these people who were aliens, Japanese aliens, were moved from camp to DOJ camp, to all these places, and eventually landed in Tule Lake, and many of them went back to Japan, because they had given up on America, not many but some. So you think about it, everything is interconnected. So the project is bigger than me, it fulfills my puzzlement, I'm thinking, so what happened? How did I get from Tule Lake to L.A.? What did people do between the bombing of Pearl Harbor to February 19, 1942? So now we found Tuna Canyon, but where did they go, how long did they stay, two weeks? And then they moved to Santa Fe or these other locations, but Tuna Canyon has -- according to my doctor, he says it's great, keep my brain moving. He says, "You're on autopilot because you're always organizing," and he says, "It's good for your brain to keep busy." Because I did have a very serious car accident and I had a brain injury. And he says, "This is good," 'cause you have to think about it and you have to prepare these PowerPoints and make the exhibit and do these things, which we finished on time, because part of our reputation was to get the trust of the National Parks that we were legitimate. If you can imagine, we only started five years ago, and we're nobody. When we go to the bank, people say, "Well, Manzanar has been here for many, many years," they'll tell me that. So I said, "Okay, here's my first hundred dollars." We got started, they gave us a free account, thank you Union Bank. And we were able to get it going, so we've had two National Park grants. We have a Reissa Foundation donation, very nice one, and we have a third one coming up.

And the purpose is to interview the descendants, and a lot of these descendants know a lot, but yesterday we interviewed someone who never met his grandfather, who was a musician. But in one of the diaries we shared with him, he learned that his grandfather would sing at the farewell parties, and he always knew all the songs. And so he says, "I walk in his footsteps." And so this is what's so great about living this long, is recycling your friends that you met before and seeing them later. In a way, going outside of yourself, don't say, "Oh, I gained weight, I got old," well, that's good. We want to live a long time. I met a lady a hundred ten years old two days ago named Mamie. She's the bright star. She made us feel good, she remembered us. And I thought that's something to aspire to. I have to be careful going home from this interview because the L.A. freeways are dangerous. [Laughs]

But I'm very cognizant of the purpose of why I'm here. Because when I went to Tule Lake, there's one activity where we go to the grave site, and we have a ceremony where all the people have passed. And so we went to one cemetery, they haven't gone back for a long time, they've been doing it at another location closer to the jail. The jail's different from the stockade, though, just to be clear. But I was looking down and they were all these graves for babies that died, and I thought, "I have to speak for them, I have to do for them. They didn't get the chance I got." Because I have this scar on my neck that I got at Tule Lake, and I believe... I was a little baby and it's a very big scar, that I had probably a cyst of some kind. And you know, these doctors were racist in some cases, and so I could have not have made it. But my father was the healer, and if you broke something, he knows how to fix it, 'cause judo people, they break their fingers, their ankles, their shoulders, they pop it back in. So I'm sure they took very good care of me to bring me back. But not everybody made it. So you see these graves marked with young babies, and you think, "You are saved for a reason."

So whether it's to bring harmony to the world, to speak up on behalf of those who can't speak, I didn't have the trauma, and I used to think reading books was enough. But every interview that I experience, you see how important this moment in time, this huge disruption of normal life, but we're not alone, this is still happening today. So we have to be like the Quakers, they were not afraid to support us. And if you look at the site called 50 Objects, I just love the one with Satsuki Ina's mother's quilt, that somebody cared for us, and so we need to care for others. So I'm very honored to be part of Densho because I know you tell the truth, and sometimes the truth hurts, but we have to do that because otherwise we will leave this earth and not have done our job. I think this happened to us for a reason, Greg Robinson said, the Jewish people write a lot and we're number two in writing. So I didn't know that, and I thought, "Well, that makes sense." And we have to keep writing because a lot of things are lost. But this diary is here forever, it's online, and the Suyama Project. And so I'll be gone, and I have fulfilled my promise to my family. It took them a long time to let it go because it's very private. And one time, Yuji Ichioka wanted to take possession of it, and I said, "We can't keep it, we have to let it go," and they didn't want to let it go. But we're ready now to share with the world. And it put a good light on some people and a bad light on others, so it's a real story, it's not just all good, and it's not all bad. So my father's disappointment in the failure of the hunger strike hopefully, by this interview, that we didn't give up.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.