<Begin Segment 13>

WH: You know, maybe a hundred years from now, people will take a disk, probably, and put it in a computer and see your films and hear your stories and see these pictures you took with this precious film in 1943. What do you hope they learn a hundred years from now?

ES: Well, you say a hundred years ago. Now, looking back to history, a hundred years back, how much history we know a hundred years ago when this German C-Z-A-R enacts, was in power, and there were other countries that were in power...

WH: You mean around 1905, that time, a hundred years ago?

ES: I wouldn't, I have never seen any history that I could pinpoint, 1905. So what I am afraid of is that this history, without museum and other publication, will die out. I don't think it should die out, but it will. What I think amongst the persons of Japanese ancestry, the Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei, due to intermarriage and so forth, they wouldn't think about their grand-, great-grandfather's experience and what they came to. So even now, we Niseis don't know too much about the Civil War in the United States. I'm afraid that's going to happen. But like museum here, I believe a picture is worth a hundred words, yeah, a hundred words. Just like in Hiroshima, that Hiroshima bombing that, exhibit they have there, it's in pictures and actual material. That'll last for a long time. But just hearsay and so forth, it just dries out, and that's what I'm afraid.

WH: So you're afraid that a hundred years from now, the Japanese American internment during World War II will just be a footnote in history that very few people know about?

ES: Right.

WH: And the descendants of those who were interned, the Gosei and the Rokusei, they'll be so distanced from their own history that it won't have any meaning for them. But that maybe the power of the images will still speak for themselves.

ES: Well, I think if they knew a little bit about, or can see it firsthand, and, of course, today they animate the photographs. [Laughs] But pictures don't lie, and I think the pictures tell a story, which a lot of times a thousands words won't tell. So I hope that as I am thinking that the history of persons of Japanese who immigrated to United States, or immigrated to South America, shall never die. I don't know what you think, Wendy, but I think shouldn't die. But like I said before, due to intermarriage and so forth, it may die out quicker than I think.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2005 Densho and The Japanese American Film Preservation Project. All Rights Reserved.