<Begin Segment 16>

EO: How do you feel the camp experience has affected your life?

FE: Well, I think as far as my life, it probably changed a great deal because instead of being a civil service worker, I probably would have been in business right along because when I returned from camp, or returned from the penitentiary after our reversal, I did go back to the store that we had and talked to the present owners. It had changed hands once. And just for the heck of it, I asked him, "How much did you pay for this store?" And he says, "What do you want to know for?" And I told him, "Well, we owned it before and we sold it for $1500." His eyes got that big. He says, "I paid close to a hundred thousand dollars for it." So, you know, during the war, everybody made money, especially in business, so we'd have been probably financially a lot better off than we are now. So it did affect us financially, at least, but as far as psychologically, I really didn't feel too affected by it. Some of the boys... in fact, a lot of the internees say that they were, they felt very ashamed and they felt that camp affected their life in all kinds of psychological ways, but in my case, I didn't feel a bit ashamed that... I didn't do anything wrong, why should I be ashamed, you know. I didn't, and I didn't experience any ostracism from anybody.

EO: You haven't felt any effects from the community for being a resister?

FE: No. Not a bit.

EO: You had no hostility?

FE: No. Well, one thing, I didn't have much intercourse with the JACL types or 442 types. In fact, my younger sister Kaoru was married to a 442 vet. But we got along fine, no problems. I think once people understand the situation, they can't help but feel that there's nothing wrong, unless they're very, very bull-headed like some newspaper columnists.

EO: There was something called the "mothers' division" of the Fair Play Committee. Who were they?

FE: I think that was a figment of somebody's imagination. There wasn't a mothers' committee of the Fair Play Committee as far as I know. And also I think another thing that I didn't know anything about and found out later was that somebody was trying to get the Spanish consul to act on behalf of the internees or the resisters, which I didn't think was at all called for, because we had nothing to do with the Spanish consul. Ours was a strictly, a U.S. issue, a constitutional issue.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.