<Begin Segment 3>

CO: Let's back up now. We need to have you explain what happened in Tule Lake, this registration.

HK: Oh, yeah. Well, Tule Lake was real good right after assembly center. We had permanent bathrooms and so forth. But, and I was having a lot of fun doing theater, joining clubs and stuff. But then they brought this registration and that really turned it around; it was awful after that. We all decided, and most of us were from Placer County, the people in the block. In fact, the whole, almost the whole ward, there were how many blocks in the ward? Six, I think, five or six, but we all decided not to, to resist the registration, and then people of course changed their mind gradually. But we decided not to register, and, and then we didn't know what was going to happen to us.

EO: Why did you decide not to register?

HK: Oh, well, we felt that, why should we say "yes, we'd be loyal," when we're, you know, treated, we'd been treated the way we had been? And, you know, not as citizens, our rights were taken away and so as a protest, we weren't gonna... and then of course, the draft. Why would anyone want to join the army, you know, and put your life on the line, when the way you'd been treated? So that's the, the attitude we had. And so we, we resisted. And, and it was a group thing, and we looked to each other to see if we were still together. And that's maybe the reason why we got a little hard on those people who changed their minds. But yeah, that's what happened. And so we never registered, and we were considered "no-nos," and we were held in Tule Lake. I don't remember ever... [laughs]

EO: Was there some dissension in your family over this?

HK: Not during the registration. My mother, her first idea was to keep the family together. So that if one of us decided we would register and leave the camp, then, of course the family would be broken up. And she needed us because my father wasn't there, although she had some friends who helped her out. We had an uncle whose family was in Japan, so he was very pro-Japan, so he was a bad influence, actually, for us. I mean, bad in the sense that we, we'd be, we were "disloyal" and we were in Tule Lake. But she depended on him a lot. And I guess we also did, too, because he was a father figure. And, but, yeah, her real concern was to keep us all together. Yeah.

EO: How old were you?

HK: I was, I think I was about twenty. I'd been...

EO: Eligible for the draft.

HK: Yes. My brother was a bit younger, so he wasn't, actually. But he went through the whole process and then later we learned that he wasn't eligible. So even though he also renounced, he didn't have to go through that legal process. My sister, too.

CO: Then the segregation process took place where people were moved out of Tule Lake and a whole new contingent moved in.

HK: Moved in.

CO: Do you remember that?

HK: Yeah, I remember people coming in, and you wonder what kind of people they were, because they had to be very militant to, to come to Tule Lake. We were in Tule Lake. And so there was a lot of friction at first, and they thought that we, we were not as like them, that we, we were probably more Americanized. They were, a lot of the people who came in were Kibei. They spoke Japanese and they acted very Japanese. But in time we got to know each other. But there were some who were in that bozu group, very nationalistic group, and they were, they had shaved their heads and went around doing exercise early in the morning and things like that. So that there was this indirect kind of pressure we got. But they organized a Japanese language school where they taught the Japanese nationalistic, real old-style education and so we, we all were kind of forced to go to the schools. And we were told not to speak English, which was another difficult thing for us. And so we were picking up Nihongo and trying to use it and try to become Japanese as possible -- [laughs] -- which is pretty hard to do.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.