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VY: So knowing how he felt about America, how much he loved it, it must have been devastating for him when World War II started and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and everything changed. Did he ever talk about that or did your family ever talk about that time in Hood River when everything just changed suddenly for them?

DC: Oh, yes. I am blessed and cursed with all the stories that they told me. My family, I think, is made up of a few storytellers, if not all. And I hear, where I live in Canada, so many people tell me, "My family never talked about it." So yes, he told me that... he talked specifically about Frank Hachiya, who was distantly related to us. Frank's mother, I believe, was a second cousin to my father. And Frank was a year older than Dorothy, but they were playmates in Hood River, and Frank was also born in Hood River. And he was very bright, and his father, Junkichi, inherited some money from the death of someone in his family, and took his sons to live in Japan, and I believe his wife as well, I'm not quite sure about that. So Frank and Homer, his older brother, were going to Japanese school, and Frank said -- he was very bright -- he said, "I do not feel Japanese, I want to return to America because I believe in democracy." And so he convinced his father to return. So Homer was left with his mother in Japan, and Frank and his father came back to Hood River. And Frank graduated from high school and was going to the University of (Oregon) when the war broke out, and he was expelled, as were many Nikkei after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was extremely unfortunate and unfair. And so before Frank even was incarcerated, he volunteered to serve in the American army because he believed in democracy, even though his father was now imprisoned. And I believe he went, yeah, he received some training and came to Tule Lake in uniform to see his father who was living in the bachelor quarters of Tule Lake. And my father and (Frank) he had a conversation, and my father said, "What are you doing fighting for a country that throws us in a place like this?" And Frank said, "Well, Mr. Morita, I believe in democracy." And so I think the fact that my father would even ask Frank that question indicated the bitterness my father felt. And being torn away, I think, from that beautiful place where my father was living and thrown into these badlands, I've been to both places, I've been to Tule Lake and to Minidoka, and I could see that it's not green, it's not lush, it's very sere and arid and dry. It's not the place that my father would ever want to settle in, and then to be treated as a prisoner for something he hadn't even done. And my father, at that time, never felt that Japan would ever win the war. He said the Japanese couldn't possibly win because they're resource strapped. It's a country that doesn't have a great deal of resources and America has so much resources that they (the Japanese) were never going to win. But when I was born, and when I grew up in Chicago, I believe that I can truly say that when I knew my parents, particularly my father, they were defeated people.

And it was only until I was older that I became cognizant of that psychological frame of mind, and that was when I saw some of the native people who lived in Chicago, and I said, "I've seen that look before, I know that look," and I realized that that's where it came from. It comes from being denied your dignity. And so, yeah, interesting sad stories. But it's a feeling that many people have, if you think about it today, all the people that are displaced and homeless, so many now. And there are currents within the country you live, and in the whole world, that we as individuals have no control over. And so you manage the best you can, but sometimes life throws you these curves that you would never have envisioned, my father would never have envisioned being imprisoned in America. But when I would say that to my mother, she would say, "Well, Diana, if I had stayed in Japan, I could have suffered the same fate as my eldest sister," who had married this Tokyo banker.

VY: And what happened to her?

DC: And she was living in probably very nice surroundings. I tried to imagine it, but, of course, I really didn't understand what Japanese architecture was at the time when I was growing up, and these are very flimsy homes by our comparison, the paper doors and everything, and things catch fire so easily, and the firebombings were happening during the Second World War. And the bomb hit my eldest aunt's home, and she lost at least two or three of her children. And she had told them to run in one direction; the ones that ran in the opposite direction lived. And she was holding one that was the infant, and the baby died in her arms, and my mother says there's even a scar, there was a scar on her eldest sister's face from the fire. And so my mother felt that -- and this is another rationalization, of course, for her life -- that she was better off in America even though she went through hard times, that she would have been subject to possibly even greater harm had she lived in Japan during the war. So, yeah, I guess we make peace with our lives by telling ourselves stories and telling other people the stories of our lives, right? And so you pass down your values from one generation to another, and it often made me feel very trapped, I must say honestly. That are the choices in life either to lose your children by firebombing or to be incarcerated? It was very grim, the realities that she was telling me. Of course, they're very much in keeping, I think, with the Japanese sensibilities because they used to drag me to these chambara samurai movies, they're called chambara movies.

VY: How old were you when this was happening?

DC: Oh, my god, I was very, I was in Chicago, and I believe I was told that the films were shown first at the Greek Orthodox church in the ghetto, and then later at the Elm LaSalle church. So I was taken there and I just hated those films, I mean, people stabbing each other with these samurai swords and these men with these fierce faces. And thought, oh, my god, and they look like us, and of course they don't look anything like Gary Cooper or Van Johnson or those faces. And it was a lot to take in.

VY: Did you feel any kind of connection to it or did you feel really separated from it? Did it feel like, "this is my heritage," or, "this is not my heritage"?

DC: Oh, no, not when you're three, you don't even know the word, what "heritage" means. But you think, "These people look like me but they really are Martians." And they looked like Martians, they were as alien as Martians to me. And they're so violent, and these men are expressing this kind of emotion from their hara, their stomach, where the Japanese believe your spirit lies, the ki is in the belly. And so my father would always talk about getting angry, and hara ga tatsu, which is his way of explaining that he would get angry. And so the depth of their feelings, I think the Japanese don't express it in their faces, but their feelings run very, very deep. And they're often very extreme and very fierce, and it was frightening. It was almost like going to a horror film, right, when you're seeing people murdered and looking angry like that, and I thought, "Why are they dragging me here? This is so painful." But now I have a collection of these chambara films, and I can appreciate them, I certainly don't approve of the violence.

VY: Maybe you understand them more now?

DC: Yes, because I'm older and I've had some education, and so I understand that the concept of bushido is very important. The spirit of compassion and taking responsibility and being honorable, all those things I think I've taken to heart. But, of course, as a five-year-old or three-year-old, you don't understand those concepts at all. So I think the Japanese culture is very remote, especially to a child growing up in America.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.