<Begin Segment 14>

FK: Now, do you think... have you ever talked to your kids about that period of time?

GN: Not until they saw the video... what was that video in 1990?

FK: Snow Falling on Cedars? Snow Falling on Cedars, that one?

GN: No.

FK: After... Visible Target?

GN: Visible Target. And of course, my daughter saw it, it was... I think she was, she was through school, or when she graduated from Bainbridge. She saw that and my wife told her that we were, we were in that group that left Bainbridge. She says, she says, "You guys went? You guys were born and raised on Bainbridge, weren't you?" That's what she said. And my two boys, they didn't say much, until, until you got involved, heavily involved with this reparation bit, I mean, the evacuation, within the last, what, fifteen years? And like I always said, you did a lot, the community was happy then and up 'til today. My daughter was twelve years old, well, she's thirteen just the other day, and she wrote an essay.

FK: Your granddaughter?

GN: Yeah.

FK: Yeah.

GN: About "Unsung Hero," talking about me. I gotta show it to you.

FK: What did she say?

GN: She says that it shouldn't happen again. What happened was because of what we look like. In other words, the Japanese phrase, Japanese, "never let it happen again."

FK: Nidoto nai.

GN: Yeah, she wrote that. I have it in my car, I'll show it to you.

FK: Okay, good.

GN: And that special letter Earl Hanson's boy, grandson, he's fourteen years old. And I don't know if I showed you that or not, but he wrote a beautiful essay about what, what happened to me and how close his grandpa was with us. And that was, that was, come from a fourteen-year-old, that was special.

FK: Why do you think it was so hard for us to talk about it to our children?

GN: That's the Japanese way; we never talked about it. I guess, I guess we were, I guess we were ashamed. What's the other word... it's a stigma, to this day, what happened to me, 'cause I never dreamed of going to war with Japan. Growing up on Bainbridge, fooling around with more white kids than I did... you know, I probably thought I was white. One Japanese gal, Japanese gal says, "You're a banana." White inside, yellow outside, but you're white inside.

FK: Yeah, but bananas have a peel, though. [Laughs]

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.