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LD: What about your life chances? Did you think that you could do anything you wanted with your life, or did you think there were certain limitations on you because you were Japanese? When you say those were the only two incidents, what about what you hoped to do, planned to do with your life? And as you looked around and see what other, what was happening to other people's chances, what did you think?

EU: I guess I have to admit that I always was optimistic about my chances, that we always had inbred in us the whole Horatio Alger concept and such, and America was a land of opportunity. And there were enough, I guess, examples of Nisei or older Japanese who had achieved, at least to a degree that they were looked upon as leaders in the community, and that we weren't totally denied opportunities for advancement for bettering ourselves, or with people in the professions. There were attorneys, there were doctors. Quite unlike other ethnic groups such as the Mexicans at that time, the Filipino immigrants especially, the older Filipino men who were even denied bringing their families to the United States, and so they were all single men, they didn't have opportunities, but we saw greater opportunities than them, so I was always optimistic.

LD: What did you want to be when you were in high school?

EU: Of course, I aspired to be, hoped to be a doctor of some sort, not really knowing what all that meant, other than the fact that I did want to pursue a college prep course in high school in order to be able to go on to college. Of course, with the, bringing on a war that kind of put a crimp in my plans for the future, because things became very in-depth, and I had no idea what we were going to do from then on, and with the evacuation and all, it just threw everything in a great big mess that we didn't know how we were gonna get out of. I've always reflected back in terms of, well, okay, we accepted the evacuation thinking that in six months we'll probably, everything will shift back to normal and we'll be home. But weeks passed and then months, and nothing was getting resolved. And then, of course, we were shifted from these assembly centers on to the more permanent relocation centers more inland. But even then, it was difficult, even talking with older people, it was difficult for us, even for me to conceive of when this whole thing was going to end, whether this was going to be the way we're going to live here on out. It was a big question mark. And so we lived from day to day, doing the best we could. Then probably the only break seemed to have come when the army changed its mind and we were able to enlist in the army.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1985 The Center for Educational Telecommunications and Densho. All Rights Reserved.