<Begin Segment 3>

Q: Why wasn't there more dissention, why didn't more people refuse to go to camp?

B: Oh. Well, for one thing, the median age of the Nisei at the time was nineteen and they were the citizens. The leaders of the community were Issei and they were forty-five and they had no power at all. And also the first, within the first week the FBI had rounded up everybody who had any kind of standing in the community who might have been a leader. So the Nisei were young and inexperienced and also because we were all pretty well brainwashed into wanting to do what the hakujin wanted us to do. And that was to be docile and accepting of whatever the decree was.

Q: Do you have any feelings about why it's taken so long for the Nisei to articulate some of the shame, looking back?

B: Yeah, I think that what happened was we were young at the time, we were... the median age as I say was nineteen, an age in which we should have been establishing our identities and saying to ourselves, "This is who I am, I like who I am, and I am a farmer, I am a gardener, I am whatever I am. And I have worth as an individual. "Well, when you have your country that you love banish you and say, "Get out of my sight, you are suspect and a traitor," it does things to you emotionally. And I didn't even, I refused to think about it as a major moment in my life until maybe thirty years later. I looked back, it was like a thirty year double take. And I said, "My god, I allowed this to happen to me?" And then in my fifties, when I was able to look back and say that was a terrible thing and I went through all kinds of emotional trauma, feelings of rejection, and internal family strife because of it, the enormity of what happened to us became clear. And then it was... then I was able, having established some sense of security about myself, to speak out and say the things that I did say.

[Interruption]

NB: I think the unhappiest time, the period of adjustment, was when we first got there. And the importance and the enormity of what was happening to our lives dawned on us. And I was still feeling pro-American. I was an American, I didn't feel Japanese. But my mother and my father would say to me, "How can you be pro-American when they've got us in this prison camp in the desert?" And I would say, "Well, I can't help it, that's what I am." And they said, "But real Americans aren't locked up." And all could do was cry. So we established a truce after a while because it seems silly to keep on fighting. But it wasn't a very friendly feeling within the family.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.