Densho Digital Repository - Tom Ikeda Interview (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-484-8)

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BY: So, Tom, you were ten, about ten when the war ended? No, I'm sorry, you were born about ten years after the war. So was the war and imprisonment discussed much at home? What did your parents tell you about it and what kind of things did they say?

TI: They didn't really hide it, but they didn't really talk about it. I mean, the way they talked about it was when we're out in the community, and they would mention, "Oh, we knew them in camp, and they were in Block 16," or whatever. And so there was this sense that there was something that happened where all these people were together, but it wasn't clear. They never sat us down and said, "So this is what happened to us." So there was just these little tidbits of information. It really wasn't until I was in high school, when there was a teacher in particular, Elaine Wetterauer, and Elaine was a Japanese American, and she was born at the Tule Lake concentration camp in California. And I remember Elaine, one day, giving me a book to read, it was the novel No-No Boy, and she said, "You need to read this." So I was a good student, I read it, and this was a novel about the World War II experience, but more the aftermath from the perspective of a draft resister. And so I learned a lot, and I remember then going back and asking my parents more about what happened. And they, again, answered my questions, but you kind of get a sense, when you ask questions of your parents, when they don't want you to keep going. And so they would answer, but it wasn't like they were that forthcoming with a lot of what was going on. And so I learned a lot at that point in terms of just reading books. And it came out around then, that I think Michi Weglyn's book Years of Infamy came out, that's when I was in college, but I read that. So there was, at this point, sort of more and more literature starting to come out that I could read.

BY: But we think of Franklin as a very fine institution, you were not taught about what white people call internment in high school?

TI: No, so this was not part of our curriculum. Even though, when I was at Franklin, a third of the population was Asian American, of which probably a third of that was Japanese American. So there was a significant Japanese American population, it was not part of the curriculum, other than these little things where the teacher would, like Elaine Wetterauer would give me this book.

BY: Could you spell Elaine's last name? I guess the first name is the traditional spelling?

TI: Yeah, and W-E-T-T-E-R-A-U-E-R. And she was one of, this incredible, incredible teacher.

BY: Now, did I understand right that that was, her class was the one in which your classmates were Lynda Barry, Mark Morris?

TI: Right, right. So she taught the junior level honors language arts class, and this was a class where... and she was this incredible teacher that would challenge us to think and write. And in that class, I graduated in '74, but in there was Kenny Gorelick, the saxophone player Kenny G, Lynda Barry, the writer/cartoonist who, I guess this year just got the MacArthur genius award. Mark Morris, the international choreographer and dancer was in there, kind of the class comedian was John Keister, he would always keep us in stitches. So it was a very interesting, creative group. And it all came out because I remember one exercise that Elaine had us do was we each had to give a presentation in front of the class. And she said, "Pick your topic," but you had to go up there give a ten-minute or fifteen-minute talk. And there you could just see the personalities come out, where I remember distinctly Mark Morris had fencing gear, and he's up there showing us how to fence and all the different moves. It was just a really interesting, fun class.

BY: Just amazing to have a teacher as inspiring as that. So in his oral history, your father doesn't seem to really complain or grieve, kind of makes light of things like the lack of toilets and some other harsh elements about coming back one day and being greeted by men with, soldiers with guns pointed at them. Was that typical, to downplay or minimize the awfulness of the experience?

TI: Yeah, I think it's common. The other thing, too, it's interesting, because the interview was done by a white male National Park Service park ranger, and I think you probably see this, too, I think the interviewer matters a lot in terms of what comes out in the interview. And when I look at the body of work that, and this was done with some of the Manzanar park rangers, I detect a difference in terms of, oftentimes, especially that generation, and how they talked about the experience. I think, if you can imagine, someone who's gone through that kind of experience, talking to a white government official about what happened, I think there was some of that going on. That I think if I were to do the interview or someone else, we would probably capture other things. And that's very interesting in terms of just the whole art of oral histories, and to recognize the role of the interviewer, and to also, in some ways, it's interesting then to -- and I'm sure they're going to do this sometime in the future with artificial intelligence or something, to just look at the body of thousands of interviews we have online and to start maybe seeing some of these patterns, and if there are patterns. Especially if someone has done multiple interviews, and were there differences in how they talked about it, things like that. My dad tends to be pretty upbeat and optimistic, but I think if you ask the right questions, in particular when I talk about how his close-knit group kind of broke up, I'm not sure if that came up in his interview, but that would be something that would be very important to dive into. To set up what it was like before, sort of how they were, and then why his friends made the decisions they did, the impact of it, and the consequences of that. It's incredibly painful to my father.