<Begin Segment 2>

LD: You were at Crystal City.

KK: I was in Crystal City.

LD: Tell us about Crystal City, what was that and what happened there?

KK: When I was... when we first were evacuated, of course, we went to Santa Anita Assembly Center with the rest of the family. And then from the assembly center we were sent to Amache, Colorado. And from Amache, Colorado, then... oh, all this time, my father, who had been incarcerated in February of '42, he was in internal security camps all over. He was in Lordsburg...

HS: Yeah, they moved him around a lot.

KK: ...Bismarck, and he was in Santa Fe. In fact, he was in Santa Fe when Ernie, who was a minor and wanted to join the army, Ernie had to travel from Amache to Santa Fe to get his father's written permission to go into the army.

HS: They gave him a nice letter, didn't he?

KK: He gave him a letter and told him that he was... well, I don't know what exactly the conversation was, but what I perceived what had happened is that there was a misunderstanding that Ernie felt that his father had said he was going to fight in the American Army and that he did not expect him to come back. But that he should, as all good Japanese, you do the best you can. And I think my brother had felt that his father had sent him off and said, "You'll be killed."

HS: No, but he said, "Do a good job as an American citizen." I remember seeing a letter from Dad.

KK: But there was something there that, for years and years, my brother just had something against my father.

HS: Really?

KK: That told me that, and I perceived it, that he was that he felt that he got this message from my dad, "Go, but don't come back." And it wasn't that at all, and my father, when I talked to my father about it, he said no, he just meant that he didn't think he would come back, being that the war was the way it was. But anyway, that was one of those things that happened. And I guess it happened to other people, too.

LD: What kind of thing happened to other people, do you think?

KK: That there was misunderstanding in that if the sons went off to the American Army and the fathers were perceived to have thought that they wouldn't come back, they thought they were sent off to...

LD: You mean that Ernie felt that your father might not approve of his going to fight for the United States, is that what you mean?

KK: That's what I had perceived it to be when I was younger.

LD: Would you explain that again? Start with the fact that, what your father, what Ernest thought your father said to him and what that meant to him.

KK: Okay. I think that my father had said something like, "Go out and fight a good fight, but you probably won't come back." But that's the Japanese way, is to go out and do the best you can until you die, even if you meant that you died, you sacrificed yourself.

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