<Begin Segment 38>

AI: And I was wondering, did you choose or was there ever a time when you decided to talk to her about what had happened during World War II and the camp experience?

CN: Oh yeah. We talked about it a great deal. And it was because my husband was interested, too, so she was just included in all this. And I would, I would freely talk about how tough it was, and sometimes I'd give my husband a bad time to say, "You know, it's because of people like you that gave us such a bad time." [Laughs] Which was terribly unfair of me, but I have to let you know that I, that's what I did. And he would always say, "Well, gosh, that was really tough," and "I just don't see how all of you were able to go through that." And "I don't think we'll ever really fully understand what it was all about," I mean, "what it was like." So she was involved in all this.

AI: So unlike many other Sansei, she really grew up knowing about what had happened.

CN: Yeah, it was because -- and if I'd been married to a Nisei person, she would be just like all the other Sanseis, but my husband would ask lots of questions. He was very much interested in history and politics and that kind of thing. So... and I, we hob-nobbed with both Niseis as well as Caucasian people. I'm the gregarious one. My husband is not quite so, but he got to meet all the Bellevue people, and so he remained very much interested. And, as I say, if it weren't for that, she would have experience just like all Sanseis did, not knowing a blasted thing other than the fact that yes, we played baseball and had dances and that kind of thing.

AI: Well, that takes me a up a little farther in your timeline because, let's see... you mentioned that you had helped found the alternative school in the late '60s. And then now into the '70s, where did your career go from that because I know at some point you were, became affiliated with UW, teaching there.

CN: I started teaching there in 1972, and it was ten years later in, well, 1983, because though I was no longer there, I was asked to fill in and did some, also some teaching at the junior college, which I didn't really like as much as at the U. It was just different.

AI: And what, what courses were you teaching at the U?

CN: In social work and I enjoyed it. And that's where... at the time I was there, there were a number of Sanseis who went into social work, and they are all doing extremely well. We're all proud of them, but we, that's when they forced me to talk about my experience during World War II. They had just heard something about it, and their parents hadn't told them anything. So I was forced to lecture about it.

AI: What kinds of questions did they have?

CN: "Why?" "Why didn't you, why did you all go into camp? Why didn't you demonstrate? That's what we would have done." And I had to explain to them, well, for one thing, we didn't even hear about anything called "demonstrations." And for another thing, the majority of us were under the age of eighteen. And our parents, practically all of them, were citizens of Japan, and they could not become citizens of the U.S. So I, so we all had to look at what happened, how we behaved, our parents behaved, from, from that window and not from what was happening -- how we could handle things in the 1970s and 1980s.

<End Segment 38> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.