<Begin Segment 7>

RD: So when you left after a few years, you're about ready to go into high school, right, when you left camp?

KS: Yeah. Started as a freshman.

RD: And was it uncomfortable for you to re-acclimate that into what we would call regular society? You'd been in prison, essentially.

KS: Yeah. Well, when we left camp, we were of the group that had no destination and no money. So the government set up temporary camps in several parts of Los Angeles. One was the Lomita air strip, army air strip which is now Torrance airport. And there we were sent, and there was a government office there to try to rehabilitate us back into society.

[Interruption]

RD: So you get out, did you face a significant amount of prejudice when you came out?

KS: Yes. That was my first experience with prejudice. Of course, being in the camp, we were isolated from the general population, so we had no experience with prejudice from the outside until we left the enclosure of the camp and got back into Southern California here. And that's the first time we had to face and intermingle with the general population. And that was my first experience with racial prejudice, being a victim of racial prejudice.

RD: Do you think that it damaged you permanently, did it change how you felt in your place in society?

KS: Yes, I think it affected every one of us who were victims of racial prejudice after we were removed from the camps. It took me a long time to get over the anger.

RD: Well, you don't seem bitter. Why is that?

KS: Well, in time, it just kind of wore off. I remember whenever I heard the word "Jap," I would just kind of go a little nuts and crazy, and I'll start swinging first and ask questions later. And took me a long time to get over that.

RD: Do you remember Ben Kuroki coming to the camp?

KS: Yes.

RD: Speaking of the word "Jap," because he used it.

KS: He did?

RD: In his speech, yeah. He's still trying to get over that. Well, he was made to read it, the drafting statement.

KS: Well, one of my delinquent friends in Heart Mountain married Ben Kuroki's younger sister, Mary Kuroki.

RD: But you remember his visit there? Because he was a big...

KS: I remember the notice and the big hoopla about him arriving, but I didn't go and actually see him. But I know that it was big camp news that he was coming. It was big news, big news at the camp.

RD: Yeah, he was a big war hero.

[Interruption]

RD: So you've managed to get past it. What is it the Japanese say, "Don't forget"? "Don't be bitter but don't forget"?

KS: I don't know that saying. [Laughs]

RD: So does it stay with you every day?

KS: At my age now, no. I'll be eighty next month. But it stuck... well, it's a matter of degrees. It gradually slowly leaves as you get older, like your memory. And the experiences has less effect on me for a number of reasons, as you intermingle with society and start making friends, and the incident becomes more and more ancient history. The younger generations coming up, I never married, but brother and sister's kids and their kids, they all intermarried. Most third and fourth generation Japanese kids that married outside of their ethnicity, almost entirely. Great majority of the Japanese third and fourth generation had married people other than Japanese.

RD: Why do you think?

KS: I think the desire to be American.

RD: Survival.

KS: And America is white, Anglo-Saxon White Protestant, that's America, always has been. And so those who weren't, the only way they could try to be that is to marry one another or become, try to become part of a group of white America, which I did. I was pretty good at that, I was pretty successful at intermingling with the non-Japanese.

RD: But before you went to Heart Mountain, you were already in that society. Didn't you consider yourself a sort of integrated American at that point?

KS: Oh, before... you're talking about before Santa Anita?

RD: Yeah before Santa Anita.

KS: Before Santa Anita, at the Avalon Boulevard elementary school, I had no concept that I was any different than any other kid. At that age, I don't think most, any kids really have a concept that they're different. You're all speaking English and we're all going to school and learning the same thing, doing the same thing, playing the same games and sports and all this, Lone Ranger and all that stuff on the radio. Yeah, I had no idea that I was different until the war started.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2010 Raechel Donahue and Garrett Lindemann and Densho. All Rights Reserved.