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VY: So let's get started again. Let's go back to when your family had to leave your home. And you got on a bus to Puyallup Fairgrounds. Once you arrived at Puyallup Fairgrounds, do you have any memories of that?

KI: Puyallup was a child's dream. Running around free, like in your home you're restricted. But here it's barbed wires, but then within the barbed wires, there was so much space and room to do things. And one of the things I loved was getting a handkerchief and making a parachute. And throwing the parachute up and watching it settle down, I remember that. All these other kids you could hear running around. And then one incident which gave me joy was getting a popsicle. And right outside the fence was a grocery store, and some of the kids from the outside would be runners going between the grocery store and the fence. So you would give them money and they would bring back a popsicle or something. And I didn't think about the fence as a negative thing. But it's like here is something we can do, get popsicles. [Laughs] That was joyful. And starting in Puyallup and all the way even into Minidoka, you're constantly exposed to other kids. It's not just school, but it's the mess hall. Bunch of kids could get together and decide to eat together or something. And then you had all this time hanging around on your block with the other kids. But there was a price to be paid, and the price to be paid is being bullied. And if you... I don't know why I had the bully "kick me" sign on my back, but I remember two girls a couple of barracks over would tease me, and I never fully understood it. And can you imagine girls teasing boys? Well, they were older. Or the one incident that was traumatic for me was a snowball fight. And somehow the older kids got this younger kid to get into a snowball fight. And I felt they were edging this kid on, and he was throwing all these snowballs at me, and I was throwing snowballs back, but I seemed to be losing. I was so mad that I saw a piece of coal and I wrapped the snow around the coal and threw it at him. And amazingly, it hit him and caused him to bleed. So the other kids were watching and they ganged up on top of me. Said, "Hey, you weren't supposed to do that," and then of course they took the kid to the hospital. And in the meantime, the older kids would gather round and berate me. And there I am amongst these guys and they're just berating me. And I thought, oh, it was terrible. Bullying isn't just bullying, it's just some people being mean to another person. But bullying is also a way in which groups socialize younger kids. And so when they see some kid who isn't quite, if you will, with it, he's the target. [Laughs]

And it reinforces, in this sense, the notion of perseverance, of toughness, of putting up with difficulties whatever comes your way. You're supposed to be, if not a man, a real Japanese. That seems kind of funny, but the propaganda in Japan in the 19th century, reinvented the samurai and the yamato damashii. The sense of a people who are strong, who are superior. And so growing up, the main division was Nihonjin and hakujins, Japanese and whites. The others were, I don't know where they were, but that wasn't the issue. And in the camps where the boys were sort of socializing you, it's like Japanese people, Nihonjin people are so tough, they could do anything. And they would, even with poor equipment, they would survive. And that's the propaganda that the Japanese government gave, is that Japanese are so strong and have this yamato damashii spirit. The hakujins are weak. And the contradiction is, "Well, you're in a hakujin society, what are you talking about?" [Laughs] But there was this Japanese/white difference, where the whites were viewed as weaklings. And the boys were, I guess, reinforcing the toughness with which you should be a real Nihonjin guy. And he says, "What do you mean? We're Americans." But Nihonjin, there's that contradiction. And I never fully really could capture that contradiction. Like, "Who do you want to win the war?" "Oh, of course, America." But then periodically, there were magazines that would come to the camp like Life, which was a photographic essay. And there were pictures of the war, and kids, I noticed, were sitting around looking through the magazines and seeing these pictures of the war. Well, there was one picture where the Japanese soldiers were sitting on a cannon saying, "Hey." I said, "Oh, my goodness." "Well, what side are you on?" "Well, we're Americans, aren't we?" And then he says, "But, you know, they treat us like shit. Are we Americans or what?" And this contradiction between the two. Like when I saw that kid in Okinawa, I empathized with him. But I'm American, to hell with it. [Laughs]

But I could never fully get rid of the... you know, if I were of age and asked to go to war, I would have gone to the 442nd. Oh, yeah. But I would have gone with the sense that you got to be brave, you got to be tough. If the guy says charge, you charge. Somehow the idea gets droned into you, from bullying, through other things. And being caught between two worlds is difficult, but if they ask you to go to war, you do what you do for America. But you still carry the Nihonjins' character.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.