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TI: So just to fill in the gaps a little bit in terms of your life history, in the film it mentioned that, so the family was reunited at Crystal City. So I guess one question I wanted to ask is, do you remember your father... because you were very young, do you remember the reunification of the family?

SI: So let's backtrack for one second. So once they renounced... let's see if I get this right. So they renounced and my father was a member of the Hoshidan, my mother was a member of the Joshi Seinendan, the women's group. And they, as the Hoshidan leaders were growing in their protest activities, and they had these marches, my father was participating in that, and so when they did the sweep and removed the main leaders of the Hoshidan, then the second group were identified then as the leader, and so the names were on the list.

TI: And this is your father, was in that second group?

SI: Yes, he was in the second group. And I talked to another renunciant, and he said, "Your father's group, they were the quiet ones, they were the writers," he called them, "the intellectuals," who has more principled ideas about what was happening to them, but when they took the more overt leaders away, those leaders put their names on the list, because they didn't want the Hoshidan to be dissolved. So with his name on the list, then he was put in the jail in Tule Lake and then removed to Bismarck, North Dakota.

TI: So just a question, because you mentioned the jail, and there is a well-known photograph, and in this photograph, looking inside the jail, there's, your father is there in a prominent way. When did you first see that?

SI: Oh, gosh, that was such a... that was a really pivotal moment for me. It was 1988, the Civil Liberties Act had just been passed. I'd been living overseas teaching, and so my son and I came back after being gone for a year, and wanted to see the exhibit. I had been gone for the whole redress movement and all of that.

TI: This is the exhibit in Washington, D.C.?

SI: At the Smithsonian.

TI: Okay.

SI: And the name of it had to do with the... was it We the People? Or something about the Constitution and the Japanese Americans.

TI: We Hold These Truths.

SI: We Hold These Truths, right. So we made specifically a stop in Washington, D.C., to see that exhibit before we went home to Sacramento. So we walked in and turned the corner, and there was this big photo. And I remember staring at it, because it's fuzzy, it's not a well-defined image. And I can't describe the feeling, but it was like sinking in that that was my father. Even though his face isn't perfectly clear, I knew that was my dad. I also remember this, my son taps me on the shoulder, and I'm crying, and he says, "Are we going to have any fun on this trip?" [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] How old is your son?

SI: He was in junior high school. Because I couldn't even find the words to say, "That's your grandfather." That never came out at that point. On our way home...

TI: So he just thought, "The first photo we see, Mom starts crying."

SI: "And she's already crying." And then another memory that came up shortly after that really led to me getting focused in on trying to understand what happened, and that culminated in making the first film, Children of the Camps.

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