<Begin Segment 8>

CO: Yeah, well, I'm aware that us Nisei have had to struggle with coming to terms with the internment. It's taking a long time.

HK: Uh-huh.

CO: Maybe it will never be fully resolved for some of us. But it certainly was a traumatic and powerful experience --

HK: Right.

CO: -- that questioned us very, down to our core, really, it seems to me.

HK: Yeah, it's...

CO: Don't you think that's still going on?

HK: Yeah, I think so. I don't think it will ever go away. Yeah. We try not to talk about it, really. [Laughs] I mean, I've talked about it, but I, I haven't avoided it. But I don't know. I don't really talk about it, actually, unless I'm forced to. [Laughs] And yet, I try to use it as material and it's very difficult to write about it, too. I don't know why after all these years, you know, I should be able to filter things and put 'em in right perspective, but I don't know. I find it very hard. I guess I'm still too close to it, and I'll always be.

EO: You said that you were happy there, I mean, at the beginning.

HK: Yeah, we were happy. Happy in the sense that many Nisei say that they had a good time. And we did have a good time, you know. I was doing things that I always wanted to do. I was able to read; I read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath in camp, the first part of camp. And I was able to do theater. I was just beginning to get interested in theater. I was in L.A. and I had taken up drama in high school. And so it was really, I really wanted to act. And so whenever there was any kind of theater being organized, then I went to it. I was very active in that. I acted in, well, with Yuki Shimoda. And then I did other things; I took courses. I was, I wanted to go on to school, so I took some public speaking courses from Shibutani. And, you know, he thought I was a good speaker and he was trying to encourage me and all that. And other things, you know, you play games and go to dances and you meet other people, people from other areas, other states. And so it was, it was a good time, yeah. This was before, you know, wanting to get out, feeling the pressure of confinement, I think, while things were still rather novel.

EO: But did you, what did you think was going to happen? Did you, I mean, when you went in there?

HK: We really didn't know, you know. When nothing happened, we were happy. We didn't really think. That was one of the big problems, that we didn't think. We just let things happen. I don't think I ever... I started a diary for a short while, I kept it. I wish I had really kept it. I wrote a story about going to camp and I was in this writer's club, which was mainly students from Cal, college students, and I felt very intimidated and so forth. But I'd just go there, and they would be writing stories, you know, kind of in a fashion of Dos Passos, that kind of adjective, adjective, adjective. And I thought that was the greatest thing, and they thought it was, too, what they were writing. And I wrote this story about going to camp with my zenith radio, which I bought, and it was a big deal to buy this radio, and I took it to camp and so forth. And somehow that seemed to symbolize the camp thing, and I read the story and no one said a word, and I thought, "Wow, they didn't like it." And nobody said anything. Maybe they were just moved by it, or I don't know, confused, or what. So I just threw the story out and forgot it. And many months later, the editor of a magazine that came out of that group wanted the story. [Laughs] By that time I didn't know what, where it was. I didn't remember it, either. So yeah, that was a new experience for me. So it was exciting, but this was all before the registration. Yeah, that really changed everything.

EO: How did it change everything?

HK: Well, I don't know. I didn't feel that I wanted to do all these frivolous things. Everything kind of got artificial and meaningless, it seems. Because here was this very important issue that probably was going to change or shape our future, and we were taking a stand, yeah. And then there was a division of, in camp, certain people wanted to go one way and others went the other way. And... yeah.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.