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Q: Janice, can you tell me about the photo?

JS: Well, this photo of my obaachan is actually the only photo that we have of her. She's my mother's mother, and when I see the photo it makes me very sad because she had died at Tanforan, which was the assembly center that many Japanese had first relocated to during the war. She had... two weeks prior to the evacuation, she gave birth to my Auntie Sachi, and she had not gotten over the physical and emotional trauma and the evacuation orders came down. The whole family had to, within, you know, a few hours, just pick up and leave, and at the assembly center, she became very ill. And they took her away, the authorities took her away to a hospital and my mother was refused, was not allowed to see her and she passed away. And the authorities told her that she had died of cancer and to this day, my mom has never believed that but she's never said so. Obaachan was very healthy, you know, before the evacuation, and with the movement for redress and reparations, it's given her a lot more strength to really speak up and to say really what she thought about what happened and to really understand how the U.S. government was responsible for the death of her own mom.

Q: Beth, are you interested in the camps, I mean, how did you become interested?

BS: Well, I've known about the camps for a long time, mainly from my mother who has photos of Arkansas where she was, she and her family were interned. I think, though, that the anger really didn't start until the redress hearings began to get up in its... I'm not saying that clearly. [Laughs] In any event, what happened during the hearings is my parents had written their testimonies of what had happened to them prior to the evacuation. And at that time, my father, who was evacuated with his brothers and his parents, told his story, and I had never known about his story until during the hearings, which was in '81, so I was twenty-six. And so basically, that's when my anger started to grow because I had never known and he had never told me. Nor had I asked, because I realize there is a heavy emotional thing involved thing involved with that.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.