Densho Digital Archive - Ayame Tsutakawa - Mayumi Tsutakawa - Kenzan Tsutakawa-Chinn - Yayoi Tsutakawa-Chinn Interview (denshovh-tayame

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TL: -- July 3, 1998. We're at the Tule Lake Pilgrimage at the Oregon Institute of Technology. This is Tracy Lai, and I'm interviewing Kenzan, Ayame, Mayumi, and Yayoi Tsutakawa [Ed. note: Kenzan and Yayoi's last name is Tsutakawa-Chinn]. The focus of our conversation is their intergenerational response to this pilgrimage, and how that helps them understand their own family history, Japanese American community, and identity. I'd like to start with Mrs. Tsutakawa. Ayame, I understand you were interned at Tule Lake, and I'm wondering if you've ever revisited this area since the time you were interned?

AT: No, not at all. Not once. After we were released from here, I have not returned.

TL: Okay. As we drove into the area, did anything about the plants and the weather conditions remind you of when you were here as a young woman?

AT: I don't know about the weather or the plants, but I have some very happy memory about this place. My late husband, George, came here and met me for the first time. So it's sort of a significant (place)...

TL: Well, for Mayumi and Kenzan and Yayoi, I'm wondering how you're reacting to being on this pilgrimage and meeting all these other people who have different connections to this camp.

KT: Oh, me first? This is, it's a pretty interesting experience. And so, in some levels, I really don't have a lot of connection with some of the old people here, and in some ways I have too much. I don't know whether I'm ever gonna realize what it was like to live here for that many years, but... yeah, I haven't really developed any thoughts about it yet.

TL: Well, this is only the second -- well, really the first full day, 'cause we spent all day getting here before. What about you, Mayumi?

MT: Well, I think that it's hard for us to connect the historical photos and the videos we've seen to the place, and the actual, the actuality of the experience. You can see a lot of, you can read books and you can see a lot of movies about what it was like, but I think it's just -- and you can visit the actual site where a barracks stood and you can see the mountains. But I think that it's meeting the people who are here that's really the embodiment of the experience. Because we can't know, if we haven't been here, but the, sort of the conglomeration of talking with all these different people, and just sort of feeling that mutual experience through all of their memories, that's kind of the important part for me, I think.

TL: Yayoi?

YT: I have to agree with her, and also that it still does mean a lot to me to come here and look at the barracks and look at the sights. It does make a little bit of connection to the videos or the books, but in, a lot of it is the people, also, though.