Densho Digital Repository - Amy Uyematsu Interview I (Densho ID: ddr-densho-523-3)

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BN: Did your parents or grandparents or other family members talk much about their World War II experience to your generation as you were growing up?

AU: My parents talked about it, I think maybe more than some of my Sansei friends' parents. Not a whole bunch, but enough for me to understand that for my mother, I remember she talked about how awful it was to have to get on the train in Pasadena and leave town in the train. I think they pulled the shades down and go to whatever assembly center she was sent to. So she talked about that, but she also talked about how much fun she had in camp. Because she was a high school junior or senior and was able to have a really active social life. So I would hear her talk about that quite a bit, the good times she had at camp. My dad... later on, I did try to interview my father maybe in the 1980s with a little tape recorder, that seems so old fashioned now. Unfortunately, I never was able to finish it, but I was able to hear more stories about the Uyematsu family and the camps from Dad, from doing that. And one of the things that he mentioned more than once was the sadness he had that his sister Alice, who maybe was a couple years younger than him, she got tuberculosis at Manzanar and she never survived. And so he would say how he always thought she never had a chance to experience being a young woman. My grandfather, it's funny, my Grandpa Morita, who spoke good English, very talkative, would have a lot of conversations, but I don't recall him ever talking about camp with me.

Oh, you know, I just thought of this, too. I know my parents must have talked some about camp because when I was in Pasadena High School as a senior, I was in a civics class. And I brought up the topic of camps to my teacher and classmates, and I was just really, really hurt because many of the kids in the class would not believe me that that the camps had ever occurred. Because in those days, this is, what, 1965 it would have been, we weren't in the textbook. And so they just thought, well, Amy's just saying this, where's the proof? So we've come a long way from that.

BN: Yeah, that's something. But do you know about how old you were when you first heard about this or when your parents first talked about it? I guess your mom, mostly?

AU: I don't know. I'm thinking maybe more in my teens, but I'm not really sure. I've got a pretty bad memory. In fact, one reason I write poetry is because my memory is so bad. I write poetry and I keep journals, because I know I have a bad memory.

BN: Just to follow up on that, how does that work? How do you feel that the poetry addresses that you feel like you don't have a good memory?

AU: Sometimes I can get things I've experienced written down through a poem. Like in 30 Miles From J-Town, I was able to talk about some of my experiences growing up. And if I hadn't written those poems, I'm curious whether I'd remember some of the details that ended up in those poems. I'm not sure.

BN: So you feel like the act of writing kind of brought these memories forward, sort of?

AU: Maybe, yeah, I'm not sure. "Before I forget this, I want to get this down."

BN: Looking back now, how do you feel like your family's incarceration experience affected the family dynamics, the family history? Aside from the obvious things, that your parents likely may not have even met, but how do you think it affected even the way that you and your sister were raised, for instance?

AU: Well, I kind of group our experience as being really assimilationist, really assimilating. And so I think the impact the camps had on my parents at least was that we really need to be assimilated into American society, and we were raised in a predominately white neighborhood. And I was always envious of Sansei that I met later, as I got older, that grew up in neighborhoods where there were concentrations of Japanese Americans. So it seemed like my family was one of those that assimilated.

BN: And you think that might have had something to do with that World War II experience?

AU: I think so. You know, also they're not having us go to Japanese school, speak good English, right? I think it did have an effect.

BN: Did your parents speak Japanese themselves?

AU: Yeah, a little bit. I don't think my mother's Japanese was as good as my dad's, because his was pretty good. In fact, I think his was good enough that when he got drafted in the army, they wanted him to join the units of Nisei they used as translators, and he didn't want to be sent to the Pacific, because there was a high casualty rate of Nisei being sent to the Pacific. So I don't know how he did it, but he was a talker. [Laughs] And maybe he talked his way into this, I don't know. But he became a cook, and he was a cook at whatever army base he was at. And he was able to do that rather than serve as a translator.

BN: Definitely better for your chances of survival, unless you're a really bad cook, I suppose.

AU: But you know, too, what's interesting is that, in some ways, because we were raised in a white environment, it kind of pushed me more toward wanting to know more about my heritage. And, of course, because I was experiencing so much racism, that also played a big part. I've sometimes wondered if the Sansei I know that grew up in the neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Gardena, whether they had the same kind of anger as I had growing up kind of isolated in Sierra Madre and Pasadena.