<Begin Segment 23>

TI: How were your parents, what was their reaction when they went to Puyallup?

HM: Well, they weren't happy with it, anything that was going on, of course. They were more fearful that the family would be separated but they were thankful that we were all together. They thought they would take the Isseis and separate them from the children, that's what their thought was, so they were thankful that we were all together.

TI: But in a similar way where your brother was sort of crushed that they took away his car, in a similar way your father's livelihood, the store, was taken away and he did it for four hundred dollars. Was he bitter or...?

HM: No, he was pretty realistic. He was more concerned about what was going to happen to us inside the camp. Unfortunately because my father was involved with the Japanese American Grocers Association and all this kind of stuff, they took extra opportunity to put us into an area where we didn't know anybody in that area where we lived or we were given living quarter.

TI: Was that something that you just suspected or was there actually people who told you that...?

HM: No, that was the policy of the WCCA. In the documentation that I used to look at during the process of redress, that was one of the main policies, that was to disturb the ability to organize within the community and disrupt it as much as possible. This is why they took the lawyer like Matsuda and they put him into a different area from where he belonged, and then once he got used to that area and he started getting good communications with the rest of the people, they took him out of that area and put him into a different area and they kept on doing that and finally they ended up taking him out of camps and bringing him to another camp. This was their objective, was to cause complete disruption in the communication system of the Nikkei. It was an intent. And the WCCA isn't the innocent organization that they tried to make themselves look like. They were trying to create dissension and problems and miscommunication. It was done on purpose.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.