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FK: Now, I understand that at one of your high school class get-togethers you mentioned to the, your classmates something about how they felt about it when you guys left. Can you tell me about that?

SO: I'm not quite sure whether this is gonna be answer, answer or not, but I've often wondered, Frank, we see the Japanese side, maybe we see, maybe we don't see enough of the other side. Are we drawing conclusions about our peers, or the classmates, that are incorrect or correct? Maybe they should be asked what they saw and what they felt, but I, but the... here's an interesting position, you and I have grown up in this world and we've read about the incarceration and so forth in every possible angle you think of, and it's still going on. How do we know that in 2008, as we're sitting here, are we really accurately depicting what was, what happened, or are we looking at it as a conglomerate of readings that we've gone through? Which one is the true one? You know, are we saying, in fact, I often wonder whether we say things that we want to hear other people say which may or may not be true. Now, I think I'm, I don't want to be the, to see it as a negative, but maybe we need to examine that a little bit better, 'cause at this, at our ages we know a lot more than we did in 1942. And if we're trying to recapture 1942, are we using the right tools? Are we, I mean, how is this coming about? So those are the things I think about, and especially when you think of the, our classmates, are they also in the same fix, saying, well, we're gonna have to say this because we know our buddies are Japanese, or are they gonna say, well, I'm not quite sure? I don't think it makes a whole lot of difference, but it occurs to me that maybe sometimes thinking about this might help future generations so that we get -- we can't turn the clock back to 1942, but we know things happened, and we know it happened because the people are living today, yourself, myself, others. We know it happened because it happened. I mean, we don't need any further proof. But the motivation is what, I think, becomes important, and it goes back to, maybe, what the Japanese American Citizens League said at the time of the evacuation, you better go now because in the end we'll have better relationships, but was the price that we paid, was it really the equivalent? That twenty thousand dollars is nothing but a drop in the bucket, but it, I understand that this country operates on dollars and cents and maybe that's the way they kind of cleanse themselves and said, "Oh, we treated these Japanese fairly, now get off my back." [Laughs]

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.