<Begin Segment 16>

MN: Let me ask you now about your involvement with the Manzanar Committee. You've been with the Manzanar Committee almost from the beginning. How did you get involved?

TY: Well, I heard about them sort of on the cusp of something or other one day. And so I asked the contact person, who was Sue, to come to our... we were having a, I was taking a class at East L.A., it's an Asian American class, and I asked her if she could come to that and then talk about Manzanar and Manzanar Committee. So she did come, and then she explained to us why she felt it was important. And I said, oh, god, I got to get involved with this group, 'cause this is something that... maybe not Poston, but this is the only group out there that's gonna address the kind of thing about being Japanese and incarcerated. And that was good. I have since met, of course, Bruce and Gary and everybody else, but without Sue being the one who came to our meeting, our class meeting, I wouldn't have been involved. It just seemed like a natural kind of a thing. Because after that meeting with Sue, I wanted to talk to my brothers and sisters who are older than me about what it was like for them to go to camp. And my sister said, "Oh, it was nice, it was social." She never got into how she felt ultimately, which is more important than anything else, but we never got around to that. She's still living, my sister's living in Fresno. Of course, we never talk about that part of the war.

MN: Now, you visited Manzanar before the official pilgrimage. I think it was the '67 that you went?

TY: Uh-huh.

MN: What was the reason that you went out to Manzanar?

TY: Well, I wanted to see what a camp looked like. Because, see, I had Poston, and that's all I had in my mind. So when I went there, of course, there were no buildings. All they had were the entry guard shacks. And so it was like a total... I don't know, total, I didn't feel comfortable there. I didn't feel uncomfortable there, but there was nothing that would speak to me. The only thing that they had was the auditorium, but it wasn't usable because what they were doing at the time was storing equipment for snow and everything in the building. So that wasn't something that you could access. So that was okay. The only other thing that they had there beyond that was the cemetery and the monument there. So I went there, and it was kind of moving. I couldn't read it, I had it translated for me, but I said, "Oh, okay, this makes sense." But in order for it to be a cemetery, they had to have so many spaces in the dirt. So I think some people placed rocks and put names on 'em, 'cause otherwise they wouldn't qualify.

MN: Now, did you take Carl with you at the time?

TY: No, I didn't think so because I didn't know what kind of involvement he was gonna have. So later on after I'd been there a couple of times, I asked if he wanted to go, and he went out of curiosity. And he has no problem with it since.

MN: You mentioned you went out to the cemetery, and I don't think the cemetery had a road out there.

TY: No, it didn't. What you had to do is go through the camp and come out that way. But then you come to a fence and then you had to cross over.

MN: You didn't get stuck in the sand or anything?

TY: No, I was very careful.

MN: Now, in comparison to Poston, when you saw Manzanar, it's very different. What was your reaction? Did you think this... I mean, all the different camps were going to be all different?

TY: Well, when I went to Poston, and I went more recently, they still had the grade school buildings up. And it looked different. I mean, I thought to myself, "This is where I went to camp, this is where I went to school." Out there, it would have only have been one of those tarpaper shacks that they would have had school in. And I thought, oh, god, that must have been terrible. 'Cause I know how much colder it got than Poston.

MN: Now you also attended the first organized Manzanar pilgrimage in '69. What do you remember of the pilgrimage?

TY: Actually I don't. They all kind of run together. After all, I'm seventy-three, what do you expect?

MN: But it's the first one.

TY: For somebody, yeah, but it... I don't know.

MN: Was the flatbed truck out there? I mean, did you help out --

TY: No, no, we didn't have a flatbed truck, 'cause that came later on. Once we got in contact with the Park Service, we were able to get those kinds of things. I think I took my pickup truck and we stood on top of that. Not on my cab, but on the back. So that's some way of looking out and seeing what was happening.

MN: Oh, I always thought the flatbed truck, that's why you always have the flatbed truck.

TY: No, we had to request that.

MN: Was there a feeling back then that people wanted to preserve the camp?

TY: Say that again?

MN: Was there a feeling, back in the '60s, that people wanted to preserve that camp site?

TY: I don't know that we were talking about preserving anything. I think it was just a place to go to acknowledge the incarceration. I don't know that we were we were trying to preserve anything. We were there and here was a monument and that was it.

MN: Now, did your involvement in the gay and lesbian community help you, help radicalize you to get involved with the pilgrimages?

TY: Well, what I did later on was I tried to integrate my gay life, my gay group, and come to Manzanar. So for the first couple of years, they did come and they were part of the crew of people that helped clean up the place and stuff like that.

MN: Was it hard to get Carl to come out and help out?

TY: Nah, no problem.

MN: How do the Manzanar Committee people react when you said you were gay and you were gonna have your gay and lesbian friends come out?

TY: I think initially, well, the people that I knew well were like Sue and the Rundstroms, and Sue Embrey. So they were very supportive, so it was hard for me not to include everybody and feel comfortable.

MN: So you never had problems with the other Manzanar Committee people saying, "We don't want people like this involved"?

TY: Right. If they did, they said it somewhere else, not in my presence.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.