<Begin Segment 3>

JN: Did you have to prove to the congresspeople that you weren't on the other side on December 7th? What did you say to the congresspeople?

RT: Well, I told them I was an American. I was an American citizen and they wanted to know why I was in Japan, and why I was in Manchuria. So I told them, well, I was in Manchuria because my sister and her husband were in Manchuria and I lived with them. And they wanted to know what the reason was for me being in Manchuria and Japan. And I told them, like my dad, who happened to be a World War I vet. And he was one of 'em that was very unfortunate and never received the citizenship. And so he always thought that well, in this country here, the United States, if you're white, you can get along very good but if you was Asian, you're gonna have a hard time. And because they couldn't buy land, they couldn't do anything. They couldn't -- in fact, if they were to do farming and they went out and they rented a piece of land, they could only rent it for so many years and they gotta move on. And now, I look back at a lot of this stuff that my father and them had to go through. And they talk about the blacks, how they were being treated and everything -- I think the Asians were treated just as bad. And this country talks about how Hitler hated other nationalities and things; well, this country was no different. And I've always -- I think about it now and I've always felt real bad, because of the fact this country, up to Pearl Harbor time, would not let Japanese citizens buy land. And you know that Japanese families over here, they couldn't do anything until their oldest son became twenty-one so they can buy land or rent land under his name. Otherwise, they can rent land here for so many years and they gotta move on.

TI: It was hard.

RT: Yeah, and this is what is called freedom. And I don't understand this country at all.

[Interruption]

TI: Rudy, going back to your lobbying efforts, tell me what it means to lobby Congress.

RT: Well, when you're gonna lobby Congress, you have to have something that you're fighting for. And what we were lobbying for was for the United States government to have to pay the people "x" amount of dollars for the government of the United States puttin' citizens and non-citizens into concentration camps.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.