<Begin Segment 14>

CO: After all these years, how do you think the internment affected you, yourself, and then the community in general?

HY: Oh, I think it's something we'll never get over even with redress. Because it was so traumatic that a lot of Nisei families were... the Sansei kids were never told of such things and the Sansei kids had to learn through other channels that this had been done to the Japanese Americans during the war. And David Mura, himself, was surprised to find out about it. And his, I think his folks refused to talk about it, so he found out through an aunt what had happened. And so it's been handed down from, that trauma has been handed down from generation to generation.

CO: How do you think it manifests?

HY: Like you making this documentary, for instance. [Laughs] It's a very, it's something that never really happened to any other racial group, you know, to be removed like that en masse. And the Supreme Court has never declared it was unconstitutional. They refused to hear cases that would have made them decide that.

[Interruption]

CO: When you say "really traumatic," could you be a little bit more specific about what you think was done to us?

HY: Well, we were found guilty without trial, and we were forced to give up our property and our associations, everything in the Western Defense Command. And put in these really bleak places where we were buffeted by sandstorms and heat and really uncomfortable living conditions. And I think there were very sensitive, I mean, sensitive people that did kill themselves because of it. And lot suffered depressions and like I noticed that when I watched a documentary on Estelle Ishigo, like, her husband just lost all his spirit so that when he came out, he wasn't much good for anything, you know. They kept living in the trailer that the government had found for them to live in. So it... and then this Tule Lake internment caused a lot of havoc, broke up families. Well, it did so much damage that people were forced to live -- it was bad enough living in an internment center without being segregated like that.

CO: All this creativity that had been going on before the war, it sort of never revived, did it? The writing...

HY: Oh, yeah. I think the people that were writing before continued to write. Well, it didn't go in the same direction. But I think people continued to write for the camp newspapers and a book like John Okada's No-No Boy came out of it. And what else am I thinking of? Some of Toshio Mori's short stories are based on the, his time in camp. Also Hiroshi Kashiwagi's plays and Momoko Iko's and Wakako Yamaguchi's -- a lot of literature came out of that experience, I would say. So... and then Lawson Inada's poems before the war, that includes his childhood memories of camp. No, our literature probably would have been very different without the camps.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.