<Begin Segment 3>

TI: There's a term that I'm seeing more and more -- I didn't see this twenty years ago or even ten years ago -- the term "Tule Lake resister." How do you feel about that term and using that term to describe when your father and some of the other men in that meeting, and others who went to Tule Lake, to describe it that way? How do you feel about that?

SI: I think the term is accurate, I think the word "resister" is so attached to the Heart Mountain folks and distinguishes them as men who were about to be drafted, who resisted the draft. The draft for Tule Lake, and my father's group specifically, I refer to him as a dissident, that he was opposed to the government actions, and he wasn't at risk of being drafted. He was fearful that that might come up, but he never received papers saying that he was going to be drafted. So it was even before the Heart Mountain draft movement was going on. So he was standing up for his rights, not as a provocateur or outraged protester so much as a father who was fearful about his family and what was going to happen to them and really holding onto his belief that somehow if his constitutional rights as American citizens was respected, then he would be willing to do (whatever) he would have been willing to do even before he was incarcerated.

TI: So "dissident" is what you would use.

SI: Yeah, that's the word that fits, I think.

TI: Okay, yeah, I just noticed that I hear more and more "Tule Lake resister," and I realized that I know what they're talking about, whether or not that does confuse some people, and mixing them up with the draft resisters. "Dissident" would be... yeah, it's good for me to know. So we're at Topaz, both your mother and father enter "no-no" on those two key questions, so then what happens next?

SI: So then, because they are identified as "no-no," and the government now starts to use language like, sort of splitting the community, those that said "yes" were the loyal, good guys, and those that said "no-no" were the "disloyal." And my parents were segregated to Tule Lake with the rest of the people who... with most of the people who had answered "no" to that so-called "loyalty questionnaire."

TI: And I just wanted to make sure people got this distinction, so the government framed this as a "loyal/disloyal" kind of paradigm.

SI: Right.

TI: And used that, in some ways, to fragment or divide the community. And what you just described with your father, especially his statement, it was really a opposition to the way they were being treated, it wasn't about loyalty. That if they were treated like, in your father's words, "like a free person," he would gladly serve or do other things, but it was just this treatment that he was opposed to, not a loyalty questionnaire, or a loyalty issue.

SI: Yeah, this is such an important point, too, because the language by the government, you know, was so internalized, even by our own community, and it was used to justify the incarceration of innocent people because it was after they'd been incarcerated. By this time it was 1943, that they were asking whether you were loyal or not. And because the military, the army was looking for more soldiers to go fight, and also the burden, the cost of providing for people in these prison camps, was becoming very burdensome. And so the government was looking for ways to justify the release now, and putting uniforms on these people who were viewed as a threat to national security. So from my perspective, this was completely a government-constructed manipulation of the people, and the loyalty question in particular was something that I think led to really fragmenting our community and damaging the community cohesion and closeness. Because my father, my parents never had an issue about loyalty, they always saw themselves as American citizens. They struggled with what will happen to our children if they stayed in America because of the way they were being treated. So it was this, what I called an artificial moral standard that was constructed by the administration as a means to their ends.

TI: What you're saying is really powerful to me. Because -- and I think the community needs to articulate this more clearly in terms of rather than trying to describe things based on loyalty, and I'm not sure what the right word is, but it's almost like describing things in term of opposition or dissention, and there's a spectrum.

SI: Right.

TI: And whether you agree or not, but just to talk about it that way, and there were differing levels. And I think if you did that, then people would start seeing dissention as potentially a good thing, a positive thing in terms of our country, rather than as a disloyal thing, and just to change the words of how we talk about it as a community. I think we have to do that much more.

SI: Much more. And I think we're moving in that direction, you know, the "Power of Words" movement to make sure that we're not using the language we internalized from the government. So from a psychology point of view, it's the government's manipulation of how we viewed ourselves, was by the language that they imposed on us. So by splitting the community into these two separate parts, those that were "loyal" and "disloyal," it was really a part of the mass manipulation of a perpetrator on a group of captives, and psychologically had a lot of long-term damaging effects.

TI: Okay, so let's continue with your parents' story. So because of how they answered, how they were targeted, all those issues, they are then transferred to Tule Lake.

SI: Transferred to Tule Lake. And this is where my mother's diary was so revealing, because the conditions were much more severe there, and even though I found documents that said, the administration was saying, "This is not a form of punishment, this is just a respectful way to manage conflict that is occurring" -- that they had actually inflicted but -- "was occurring in the groups." And they arrived at Tule Lake and she describes how they were fingerprinted and photographed fourteen times, for all their identifications and things like that, had these badges with name and thumbprint on the backside of the pin that she had to wear.

TI: So was this a form of harassment, or was it just government inefficiency, or what was going on?

SI: I see it as a form of dehumanizing, that she would now become, they would both become numbers as it started out in the beginning. But a way of criminalizing to be fingerprinted, and to be asked, even to be asked if you're loyal, it's like, "Did you commit this crime or not?" is the position they were put in. So they arrived, and the circumstances in Tule Lake, it was very complex as groups of "no-nos" from all the different camps converged here. Then, again, the administration's strategy of making this a segregated unit, was incomplete because (there) they were still what they called "Old Tuleans," Tule Lake people who had answered "yes" but didn't want to move or couldn't move because of an elder parent or something like that. And so there was this kind of natural tension that was there from the very beginning. And then that's where I was born, and I asked my mother, I understood that she was expecting my brother before they were incarcerated, and I asked her, why would she have another baby in camp? And she said, "We had no way of knowing how long we were going to be imprisoned, and we didn't know, after saying 'no-no,' whether we would go back to Japan or not. But mostly we were afraid of being separated." Now, they didn't know what was going to happen to them, and so there was a rumor that if you had more children, you were less likely to be separated. So they were fearful that my father would be separated from the family, from her and my brother, so this is also (from) part of a therapist, as you know, so my brother was born out of joy and hope, and I was born out of hope and despair. And in the end, of course, that strategy didn't work because we were separated from my father.

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