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BY: Wow, that's a great story. So, Tom, today, do you think that, it seems that one of the more profound effects of removal and incarceration was this damage to Nisei confidence. Do you feel that confidence has been recovered on a broad basis?

TI: I think there has been a lot of healing going on, which I think has helped the confidence. We kind of mentioned earlier about, I think the government apology was important for the Niseis to know that. I think prior to that, there was this sense that, well, there must have been really a good reason for that, I mean, the government wouldn't have done this otherwise, and they've just kept it under wraps. And I think the redress process and the commission hearings kind of lifted that cover and said, "No, the government actually misled people and this wasn't needed," and then the government to apologize, I think has allowed them to be able to speak out and have more confidence, whereas before...

BY: Did you see that in your parents?

TI: That's interesting. I didn't really talk to them that much before redress, to have a sense of where they are. But now, I'm mean, my parents now would say, "Of course we were innocent." I'm not sure if they would have said that before the whole redress process, I'm not sure.

BY: Do you still have visceral reactions as, doing archival work and you've seen these newspaper headlines, "Jap" this and "Jap" that?

TI: Yeah, I do. Maybe not as much now than, say, twenty years ago when I first started doing this. But I mean, it helped me understand the Niseis to see this, because when they say things like, "Well, you don't really understand what it was like back then," or, "why we felt like we had to do this." Because I'm seeing through the lens of this sixty-four-year-old baby boomer who lived my life, and thinking, yeah, if something's not working, you stand up, and you just, like, "I have as much right as anyone else." But you look at their world and what they were called publicly and how there were laws that prevented Japanese from coming, so there were immigration bans, and couldn't own land, it was a very different environment, and those things helped do it.

BY: Couldn't become a citizen.

TI: Yeah, yeah, couldn't become citizens.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.