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BY: So over time, has the nature of the pilgrimage changed at all?

SS: Yeah, it's changed radically over the years.

BY: How so?

SS: So before redress, so when I started going in '79 and then '80, '82, '84, it was still primarily led by students or recently graduated young people, and that's mainly who attended. Although in '82 and '84, that started to change, and I think because it's related to being post-commission hearings, and early part of the real big push for redress. So more Sansei came, there were still some Issei who were alive and spry enough, genki enough that they could go on a trip that long. And so we started having more older folks attending. I even brought my mom to, I think, the '84 pilgrimage. And that created a dilemma because we realized that Nisei and certainly Issei could not be sleeping on the floor in an exhibition hall or in a tent on the grass outside. So then we started looking for places they could stay, and starting putting people up in motels. First year we tried to find places closer to Tule Lake, but the places around Tule Lake at that time, anyway, were mainly like, more for duck hunters, and so they were very one-star, two-star places at best. So then we had to take people to Klamath Falls, which was about 30 miles away. And that was a big hassle because when it was all students, we were all based at the fairgrounds in the city of Tulelake, and everyone was together the whole time. But now that we're having these older people, and some were staying in Klamath Falls, that meant you had to have buses running back and forth, which took a lot of time and a lot of logistical planning.

And then there was a big hiatus because of redress. Everyone who would be organizing it was focuses on getting the redress bill passed, so the next one after '84 was late '80s and maybe even '91, I think it was like '91 before the next one happened, and that one was organized by people who had been good students in the early '80s, but this is like ten years later. So they're all kind of like young adults, some of them had kids already, they were all out in the workforce. And the main group was NOC, Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, in San Jose, California, because there was also a fairly large grouping of Tuleans, ex-Tule Lake incarcerees in the San Jose area. So they were kind of the main driving force. So then most of the people who came were older Sansei and Nisei, a lot of Nisei started coming, because this is post-redress. I feel like the whole redress movement opened up a lot of things for the Nisei before the commission hearings and before redress was won, were really, really hesitant to talk about the camp experience and what had happened to them and their families. And having it out there where Congress is talking about it, Norm Mineta getting up on the floor and talking about what happened to him as a kid, and having that on national news, I think it opened it up and the commission hearings were, a blue ribbon commission was sitting and listening and wanting to hear what had really happened. And then the commission report detailing that this was unconstitutional, it was due to racism and a lack of political leadership, and economic greed. I think made it safer for people to express themselves, kind of like the Me Too movement. Now it's kind of like, until that first person steps forward and comes out publicly, everyone's holding back and feeling like they're the only ones, and no one wants to hear this, and I need to just suffer in silence because nobody's interested and I'm the only one who really feels this bad. And then they find out that now there's 125,000 people who feel just as bad, because they went through the same thing, and so people started talking about it more. So anyway, we started getting more like families and more Nisei coming, and then that goes through the '90s.

And then we get people like Jimi Yamaichi, who was in his early twenties at Tule Lake, through the segregation period as well and became the head of construction crew at Tule Lake, so he actually was the foreman of the crew that built the jail at Tule Lake, and repairing the barracks or the guard towers as well, I suppose, or the hospital or the high school. His crew would be the ones that would go out and do that work. So he knew, like, all the buildings, where they were and what they were used for and how they operated, where the hog farm was. So he knew all of that, and so he started coming in the '90s, and then Hiroshi Shimizu, who was, I think it was like two or three in camp time, but his father had been in the segregation center and then his family were going to renounce and they were going to be sent back. There was some problem, and so they were in New York to get on the Gripsholm, the ship that would take people back to Japan. But then at the last moment, they said, "No, you guys can't go," I forget, there was some paperwork snafu. So he didn't go, and they ended up getting sent to Crystal City because they were still being held after the war ended. And so he got involved in the late '90s, and then other folks like Satsuki Ina and Barbara Takei, got involved in the late '90s or around 2000, and that created another big change, because through the '80s and '90s, we had all been going to Tule Lake and looking at it and talking about it as one of the ten WRA camps, other than location not really that different than Minidoka or Poston or Heart Mountain. But Barbara in particular, and Satsuki and Hiroshi, and then Jimi Yamaichi eventually, started saying, "No, we got to talk about the segregation center." Because that makes Tule Lake unique, and the whole thing about "no-nos" and "loyalty/disloyalty" and renunciation, all of that takes place, comes to a head at Tule Lake in the segregation center. And in many ways, Tule Lake became kind of an early Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib of the WRA system where things happened that nobody wants to talk about. Not the government, not the people who went through it. And as bad as all the constitutional violations were at the other nine camps, they were even worse at Tule Lake when it became a segregation center. So in the 2000s we started doing things.

So like we'd have themes each year, and so one year it was the "loyalty questionnaire," another year it was renunciation. And we tried really, really hard to make it a safe place for people to talk about that experience, because there was such a severe stigmatization of the "no-nos" and people who were at Tule Lake. It really strikes me that Tule Lake became the largest of the ten WRA camps, it had almost nineteen thousand people after segregation, but before segregation, had twelve thousand people. They shipped in another twelve thousand people at segregation from all the other camps, and they moved out about six thousand people who were "yes-yes" to other camps. So if you look at it, that's twelve plus twelve, it's like twenty-four thousand people went through the camp out of a total of 120,000 that were taken away. So you figure like one in five or at least one in six Nisei would have been in Tule Lake, but I can guarantee, like in the '80s or '90s, or even the 2000s, you walk into a room full of Nisei and say, "Hey, how many of you were in Tule Lake?" You're not going to see one in five hands go up. And that's because of the stigmatization. Like people went to great lengths to hide the fact that they were at Tule Lake.

BY: Even if they were there early, maybe.

SS: Yeah. Or if they were, that they would make a big point of saying, "Oh, I was at Tule Lake before segregation, and then I was at Amache," like my grandfather. That was his case. And if you were sent there at segregation, then you would say, "Well, I was at Poston," and you wouldn't mention that, "And then I got sent to Tule Lake."

BY: Interesting. So are the pilgrimages still going on? What's happening with the Tule Lake pilgrimage?

SS: Well, Covid, like with everything else, Covid messed it up. We were supposed to have a pilgrimage in 2020, we do it every other year on the even years. So, of course, that one got cancelled, and '22 we were debating whether we should try to do one or not and we thought, "We have too many older folks, riding in a cramped bus is too risky." So we just did a virtual one in '20 and '22. And we're now discussing, like, well, should we do one in '23 or should we wait 'til '24? Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we'll do another one in '24, but I'm not sure there'll be one in, we might do another virtual thing in '23.

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