<Begin Segment 9>

JT: Here's the other part of that that was interesting, I found out, and quite honestly, I owe a lot of this to the ranger at Manzanar. They're not like Smokey the Bear fighting forest fires, rangers -- you know this -- rangers do research. They're like academicians. They found out a lot of this information, but they also found out and told me -- and this shocked me -- you know Patricia? She and Rose Masters called me one day and said, "John, you need to sit down, we need to tell you about something." I thought they were kidding, so I said, "Okay, I'm sitting down." And they said, "We just discovered some files about your mother. Your mother was a "no-no." I tell you, if I wasn't sitting down... but I was shocked. And then one of them said, "Well, it goes beyond that. She renounced her citizenship." I thought, my god, my mother was a "no-no"? I never knew this. And my mother never said anything to me, through all the redress days. And I used to stop in L.A. to visit with my family whenever I was on my way back to California from Washington. And I would tell my parents what was going on, and at one point I was really struggling with the "no-no boy" issue, telling my mother that, "You know, the JACL really wants to eliminate them from any consideration. I think that's wrong, I really think, morally, it's wrong." They did it for a reason, and in my view, there was as much courage for them to sign "no," maybe more, than to answer "yes," which was the easy answer. And I said, "As long as I'm running this campaign, 'no-no boys' and renunciants and everyone, resisters, everyone is going to be included. But the "no-no boy" issue was such a big thing. I mean, we were still at the point --

TI: Yeah, but when you told your mom, no reaction?

JT: You know, like a mother, she said, "You just have to do what's right."

TI: But then when you think about her background, does it surprise you that she said "no-no" on question 27 and 28?

JT: Shocked me.

TI: Why? Why would that shock you?

JT: My mother was... she was a real classic Nisei, very accommodating, always taking care of others.

TI: So you're thinking even if she disagreed with the government, she wouldn't necessarily confront them.

JT: No, she wouldn't. I mean, Tom, this is a woman with four kids, one after another. I mean, age-wise we were really close. We never fought, we never argued. I cannot -- and I've thought about this for years, decades, trying to remember my mother yelling at one of us. Never, she never raised her voice. But she was also like a typical Nisei mother, who would say, "Well, I'm going to tell Daddy when he gets home." If you're a Sansei kid, man, you just straighten up just like that. You do not want your father made at you, especially not a Kibei father. So it would straighten us up, but I don't ever remember my mother speaking out in anger. She was a true Christian, she would always say, if something bad happened, she would say, "Oh, you know, just turn the other cheek." I'd say, "Mom, you turn the other cheek, you just get your ass kicked, they'll slap the other cheek."

TI: But couldn't she have been thinking -- I'm now just supposing this -- that if your father had not been taken away and he was at Manzanar, that as a family unit, he probably would have said "no-no," let's renounce our citizenship? And screw this country?

JT: You hit it exactly on what I think happened. My mother answered "no," she was separated from my father, he was at Leupp by then. And they had no communication, the questionnaire came out, she wasn't able to consult with him, so she's thinking, okay, this is how this man thinks. He has resisted this from the beginning, said it's wrong, and he will answer in defiance of the government, so he will answer "no." Well, my father answered "yes" to both questions, which shocked me as well. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah, see, that would shock me that your father...

JT: He was... oh, my father was so proud of being American. When you walked in his house, first thing you saw was this beautiful American eagle, carved of wood, I mean big, sitting on this cabinet. That was the first thing you saw, and he made sure it was placed right there. And that was one of the things he was really proud of, and he even had, I guess it was in the bedroom or his den, he had a small replica of an American flag in a frame, and it used to bug the hell out of me, I used to want to take that down and stomp on it.

TI: Well, on the other hand, now when I think about your dad doing that, it makes total sense. I mean, in many ways, he was more American than the other Niseis, that he stood up for his rights, he understood what his rights were, thinking as an individual, versus, in some ways, when I interview some of the men who fought in the 442, they reminded me of, actually, of being very Japanese in terms of how they just took orders, they did these things, it was to the death. I said, wow, that's almost like a, and they said, a banzai charge. It's like they were, in some ways, more Japanese than the draft resisters, which they stood up for their rights. And yet, how that was all turned around.

JT: It was all so complex. But my mother becoming a renunciant, I mean, she did renounce her citizenship. What I saw was, among the papers I was sent, was the interview she did with the, I guess there was an officer civilian agent who did an interview. This guy, he was a Jewish guy from Minneapolis, and he was so kindhearted, he almost led her through the interview of how she should answer. And he would say things like, well, "Here you say something, but didn't you really mean something else, and then what you were really feeling was this?" And he would say, "Okay, let's change that answer then." And he went through this interview. My father was sitting there with my mother, I think for moral support, after he'd gotten mad at her for saying, "You did what?" But he was in this interview with her and she, from what I could tell, they went through maybe twenty minutes of this, and then she fainted, she couldn't take it. And the final notation on it is that this was a mistake, that he was recommending they negate the renunciation. I found out about that, and I tried to track down this guy. He had since passed away, but through Patricia, the ranger at Manzanar...

TI: Patricia Biggs?

JT: Yeah, Biggs. Either she or Rosemary, or maybe both of them, found this guy in Minneapolis, his son, was still alive. So I called his son... I don't know how old, his son must have been in his sixties by then, and told him what happened, and said that I just want to talk to him, to tell him what his father did and how I appreciated, I just found this out. And said, "Your dad must have been an incredible man, that was a really courageous thing for him to do." Because I imagine, giving the situation, the war and everything, he could very well have lost his job. And he said, "You know, my father always did what was right." And so we had this really nice conversation, but I was so shocked by that. I have to tell you, I haven't even told my brothers. I'm the only one in the family who knows this. I've been trying to figure out, how do I tell my brothers this without some kind of... I don't know what kind of trauma it's going to put them in, because they have very strong feelings about the whole camp thing.

TI: Were they actually opposed to people who went "no-no" and went to Tule Lake?

JT: No, it's just that they're all older than I am. My two oldest brothers still live in Los Angeles, they're still part of the community, but I think they want to be just kind of left alone. They're in their eighties and they don't want to have to deal with stuff. The brother who's just older than I am was an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War, and is someone who's very aware of politics in America, and he and I communicate a lot about what's happening with the world since Trump, the kind of concern we both have, trying to figure certain things. And it's helpful for me to talk to him because he's a military guy, or he was, and so I get that perspective from him. Things like, "What happens if this idiot says, 'Give me that suitcase, I'm going to push the button?'" And he feels that... well, until all the generals left the Trump administration, that they would stop them, they would be the final decider on that and not the president. And so he's the one who's the most aware of what happened in camp, and really aware of my work with the JACL, redress, and after 9/11, and we communicate a lot about those things. He's really concerned about the legacy we leave behind.

TI: The family legacy, or the community legacy?

JT: Both. And he's a really proud guy, and he deserves to know about both my mother and father.

TI: I just think this makes your story, the family story, just so much more rich, just in terms of thinking about the pieces. And even I, when we talk about it in this interview, why your mother might have done that. Because at first look, I would have said, "Oh, yeah, your dad would have done 'no-no,'" but then in talking to you about this, and a little bit more about him, no, he in some ways valued America. So this is what makes it so interesting. It's more complicated than you look at face value. And that was the problem with the whole "no-no" situation to begin with.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

TI: That said, "Oh, if they're 'no-no' or whatever, they're anti-American or whatever." I mean, there was a faction that they were true resisters. They were resisting, they weren't pro-Japan, they were resisting based on what they believed in terms of what an American should be doing.

JT: Right.

TI: And so I think it actually, in that context, actually makes sense.

JT: Yeah, and it took me a while to figure that out about why my mother did what she did, and why my father did what he did. And as you're saying, it made complete sense to me. So what my mother was thinking was, well, he's going to be really pissed off, he's going to be angry. To have this kind of insult, having to answer this question, she assumed he was going to answer "no." But then if she really thought about my father, she would realize, "But he's always fought for what's right about America from before the war, everything about him." And so the logic would be, well, he would answer "yes," begrudgingly, but he would answer yes.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.