Densho Digital Archive - Grant Ujifusa Interview I (denshovh-ugrant-01-0002)

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BF: Now, many of the individuals involved in the redress movement have a very specific personal connection to the issue, so I'm gonna ask you the question I've been asking everyone. Were you and your family interned during the war, World War II?

GU: Actually not. Both my mother's side -- my mother grew up in Southern Colorado, not far from Amache as a matter of fact, but they were residing there. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, worked for almost forty years as a machinist on the Santa Fe Railroad. My paternal grandfather and grandmother lived in northern Wyoming since they had immigrated. And this is in fact ironically, not very far from Heart Mountain. So that neither, neither my mother's family or my father's family were interned. In fact, my maternal grandfather, whom I love and miss to this very day, would say to me as a child -- and we all lived together since my father was the eldest and we all lived on the same farm, in the same house -- he would say, "Masashi," and he would say to me in Japanese, which I then understood, "Masashi, you have to be very careful in life because you come from a dumb family." And I'd say, "Well, why do you say that, Grandpa?" And Grandpa would say, "Because I voluntarily chose to settle a part of the world to which 10,000 people were involuntarily removed. Figure it out." [Laughs]

BF: [Laughs] And so was it... so Wyoming?

GU: Wyoming.

BF: Wyoming, not Colorado.

GU: Wyoming. I grew up about 90 miles from Heart Mountain.

BF: Where, I assume before then, aside from the camp there weren't very many Japanese Americans in the area.

GU: There, there were not, there were some. And so, we occasionally had picnics on the Fourth of July. And the radius encompassed all of southern Montana and northern Wyoming, so we would choose some middle point and we would get maybe a hundred Japanese Americans from an enormous geographical expanse. And there were maybe five or six families in my small town called Worland in northern Wyoming.