Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Miyatake Interview II
Narrator: Henry Miyatake
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 4, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-mhenry-02-0016

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TI: Well let's, let's talk about that now. So later on Mrs. Amerman was your, was the advisor and later on she became one of your teachers and why don't we talk about, about that course.

HM: Well, I... Helen Amerman was a very well educated, very intelligent, typical Caucasian woman. Quite attractive. And she had the feeling that her mission was kind of different from Mrs. Pollock. Ms. Amerman felt her mission was to teach us American Democratic practices right down the line, even though we were inside the camp. And she happened to be my physics, ah... civics teacher. And she did a good job of teaching us, you know, the Constitution of the United States and how the government works and all this kind of stuff. In fact, she did such a good job that I took it upon myself to really read the Constitution. Because here was something that Gordon Hirabayashi had tried to exercise in 1942 and he went to jail for it, and he makes a presentation to us in the freshman class. And here I'm reading this thing in the actual verse and trying to interpret it. And I say to myself, "Well you know, this is the, they have a Bill of Rights, they have all these guarantees." And as a result of this kind of indoctrination -- which I got from Ms. Amerman -- I turned around and in my term paper I used all that process that I had been exposed to. And my term paper was "American Democracy and What It Means to Me." And it was a collection of all my frustrations about being in the camp, and all the things that really caused me concern about what was happening to us. And it was thirteen pages of stuff that I wrote. [Laughs] And you know, it referred to the screwball things that the Truman investigating committee did to us and their reports and everything about the, the treatment of blacks in the South, and I wrote down all my frustrations in there. And Miss Amerman called me one day after class and said she can't accept this paper.

TI: And, and before you turned it in, after you had written it, did you feel that it was going to cause problems or do you think it...

HM: No, I didn't think so. I thought for one thing it was a little bit too long. But then on the other hand I thought I got rid of all my frustrations in the paper, so I was kind of happy with it, frankly.

TI: Okay. So tell me more about Mrs., Mrs. Amerman's reaction.

HM: Oh, Miss Amerman.

TI: Miss Amerman.

HM: She said that you know, "We've taught you the civics in this class and I was expecting a paper that would, say, you know, that you empathized with the way that the class was taught and the principles that we were given. And I thought you would give me a paper that would be something that would reflect that. And here you're trying to completely upturn this whole thing that we're trying to educate you on." And she says, "I'm very disappointed in you." So odd, this was a kind of change I thought gee, she'd be happier than heck to see it. And so I said, "Well I don't think I did anything wrong. I think I was within the context of what you asked for in the term paper." And she says, "Well unless you rewrite it. I'm not going to accept it." And at that time -- going back to the school regulation -- if you had one F, you got all F's. So she said, "You know what's going to happen. If you can't, if I don't accept your term paper and I give you an F for incompletion and unsatisfactory work, that means that you're going to get all your junior year for this semester is going to be all F's. And you're not going to graduate." I had enough credits to graduate at that point. And she says, "You know, I've been watching you all the three years that we've been in the student council and you've been... I've seen you change from a very good student to which I consider not a good student" -- in her definition. And she tried to give me counsel. She was very... she was doing it for my own good. And I was, at that point, I thought to myself, "I've been suckered into the student council and did all this stuff and I'm not gonna take it anymore." I guess that was in the back of my mind too. So -- no, this is my paper, that's it. And she says, "You know, you're gonna have to think it over because this is a very important decision you have to make." And she'd read it all. But I decided I'm not gonna rewrite it. [Laughs]

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.