<Begin Segment 25>

MN: Let me ask you a little bit about your public speaking experiences, 'cause you are Mr. Manzanar, and a lot of people have heard you speak. What was the impetus that started you start talking? Because most of our community never talked about camp.

MO: Well, I used to teach it in my classes. And it was a two-day unit. My history classes would be two-day or California history would be two-day. And I know some of my former students would say to me, "That is the thing I remember most about that class." I would hope they would remember other things. And people would ask me to talk to groups, and I didn't know if it was worth my while to do it, but I started doing it. And then, especially when I retired, I did volunteer work at the Japanese American National Museum for ten years. And as part of it, I would do only the guided tours, and then as I did the guided tours, certain schools would ask that I be their guide when they came next year. And they would ask me, "Can you come out to our school and talk to the students?" And I did that, and I found that some people would want me to come just to take up a period. And I decided that, "If your class hasn't studied about what happened to me before I get there, I'm not coming."

And I still do speaking engagements -- I love junior high school kids, because that was my age. But in Thousand Oaks, one of the required books that are acceptable for the eighth grade classes is Farewell to Manzanar. And this one teacher no longer is there, but every year I would go to her class. And the way that worked out, how that started was my son has a friend whose kid was in middle school or junior high school. And they showed that clip in, that I did for 60 Minutes, somehow the teacher had a copy of it. And a kid raises his hand and tells the teacher, "I know that guy." [Laughs] And his dad calls me up, and I said, "What is it about?" He said, "My kid's in a bind." I said, "What do you mean your kid's in a bind?" He says, "He told his class that you would come and talk to them." [Laughs] It's a long story. But anyway, I get there, and his kid is waiting for me in the office, and he walks with me, then he introduces me. He's the big shot. That night, I get a call from his dad and he says, "You were a huge success." I said, "What do you mean?" He said his kid came home and said it's the first time that class has sat quiet for forty minutes. Because I didn't have anything to show them other than, say, the picture, the panoramic view of Manzanar and the evacuation order. So he and my son share Clipper tickets, so maybe one out of every three games -- I go to maybe four games -- and maybe one of those games, the kid is there. Well, the kids has graduated from USC already.

So then I get the invite, and then some other community groups in Ventura County hear about this, and they invite me, but then I charge an honorarium to adult groups. And so I've done maybe five or six different groups in Ventura County, the adults and then the money I donate to Friends of Manzanar. But it has to do with the distance. I will not travel into town to do a talk. It's just... I hate driving the freeways.

MN: But you talked to the Teachers Union before the Manzanar pilgrimage.

MO: Yeah, but that's what I've been doing for years. That's all part of it. Because I do the bus tour, and people like the bus tour because I talk about everything on Highway 395. So it works out. It's just something I do. And I will do the teacher thing as long as I physically can. But I'm eighty now, I don't know how many more years.

MN: Why is it so important for you to share your, share this history?

MO: Well, part of it has to do with those kids coming back to me on their term paper saying that, "My parents won't talk about it." And if we teach the teachers to teach about it, then in a small way we can get the story across. And especially at the beginning, because I used to do this tour for San Fernando Valley JACL before that. And what I found is that when you do it for the JACL group, you're preaching to the choir because these people are products of the camps. The good part is I give the microphone to people on the bus and let them talk about their experiences, which I learned from. The rewarding part is that when I used to do the long walking tours, there would be people who had been in the camps who would ask if they come with me. And then I would give them the microphone and let them talk. And there are new stories. There were 120,000 people in those camps, so at one time there were 120,000 stories. Now there may be 50,000. And my younger brother, who was born there, he does talks on the experience, but he doesn't remember. So before each talk he calls me, and he reads his talk over to me, and I suggest a few ins and outs here. And now he doesn't call me anymore because he's... and he's a good public speaker, but he lives in the Bay Area, and he's president of the Castro Valley school board. So it's something that I do, and I know I'm good at it. So it's better for someone who does it well to do it than someone who does it poorly. Because you want to get the message across. And it'll be... I'll do that 'til I can't do it anymore. And I physically am slowing down. People say, "Well, how do you go fly fishing?" It just takes me a little longer to get there and little longer to get back from the stream, that's all. It just takes me longer, that's all. But I still do it, and I still teach fly fishing.

MN: Now within the Japanese American community, we have this ongoing debate about terminology, and you don't use the word "evacuation," you don't use the word "concentration camp."

MO: I use the word "evacuation" in the sense of explaining it. Because evacuation means simply moving a person from the place of peril and danger to a place of safety, and that isn't what happened to us. It's like on the evacuation order it says "all persons both alien and non-alien alike." Well, what's a "non-alien"? It's a citizen for Christssake. I'm a citizen. And then a War Relocation Center, it's not "relocation," it's a prison camp. And then the semantics of "concentration camp," you talk to Jewish Americans, and I've talked to Jewish American communities, and I simply tell 'em, "I use the word 'prison camp' because then I don't have to deal with the semantic argument." What they had in Europe were slave labor death camps. That's what they were. But they choose to call them concentration camps. Well, why don't you call them what they are? And the Jewish community still insists on calling them concentration camps. Damn, they were death camps. They were slave labor camps. But with the older people, they wanted to still refer to them as War Relocation Camps, and then the museum decided that they should use the term "concentration camp." And I don't want to get into any semantic discussions, I just call them prison camp. If it walks like a prison, acts like a prison, damn it, it's a prison. And no one has a question about a prison camp. The problem with "prison camp" is that if it's a prison camp, legally, in the eyes of the Selective Service Administration, our guys should never have been drafted.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.