<Begin Segment 4>

TL: When we were on the bus we -- well, and in the program for the pilgrimage -- we learned something about how the organizing committee evolved over time, because this hasn't happened all the time. And there's been a lot of people who have thought it was, well... discouraged actually, discouraged people doing such things. Why come to this place where there aren't many physical landmarks, and so forth? And yet people have persisted in both wanting to come and, of course, in putting this kind of thing together. So I'm kind of wondering from your perspective as an extended family, what your thoughts are as far as continuing this kind of an effort to experience history and promote history in this kind of way?

AT: Is that question to me?

TL: It's kind of to the group, so the question is, what your thoughts are about this form, this pilgrimage, as a form of preserving community history, transmitting community history?

AT: Well, I think history is a very important thing. You can think that, "Well, it happened, so what?" But I think it's very important for Japanese Americans to know and keep in history book or video, whatever, so that generations later could reflect on it. So I think it is important.

MT: For myself, I'm not sure if I would come back here again. But I think it, it makes me really interested to experience firsthand other locations or places where history happened. For example, when I went to Japan when I was young, and I visited the places where my mom and my dad had lived, it was really important. And I hope that my children both do that, go to both Japan and to China to find out where their relatives lived and where important things in history took place. Because being in the place, there's no substitute really, for being in the place and that way learning history.

YT: I think this was a great program, and I think that maybe I wouldn't come back in consecutive years, but maybe in five years or something come back, and maybe I'd understand some things that I don't understand now, I might understand more. But I think this is great, that people took the time to, taken the time to set this up.

KT: I think, like any history, the whole thing will become kind of conceptual with time and a little bit diluted, just because the people who were there will... won't be here. And the whole thing will become part of history. And you'll have it, it's place in history like everything else. And I think these pilgrimages will be very important while the people who were there are still alive, and the fact that they have stories to tell. Because those are probably most important, like it was said earlier, just that those really don't have any, anything else that can compare to them, and that they, when that ceases to happen, when the story-telling and all that ceases to happen, that --

[Interruption]

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.