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NB: About redress, I think it's necessary that we all be paid a chunk of money. I would have liked to have seen more than twenty thousand, and I'm not even certain that that's in the bag. But it will mean a lot to us because we did spend nearly three years on the average in these concentration camps for something that we had no control over, that is the, our relationship by birth to the people in Japan who were at war with the United States. And for the U.S. to treat innocent people, select them out as we were selected, for our ancestry and put in the concentration camp, is a terrible thing in terms of our history of being a democratic country that does not imprison people without due process, that doesn't take away our property without due process, all these things that we believed and felt strongly about. And now, forty-some years later, it still sticks in our craw. And until the matter is settled, it's always something that makes us unhappy.

[Interruption]

NB: My parents were quite old at the time it took place. My father was nearly seventy and my mother nearly sixty, yes. So they were independent farmers, they leased land and worked it, managed to make a living, although it was pretty sparse. And then when the concentration camp experience took place, they lost that... well, the base where they were farming, and they lost the desire to want to start anew. And when they came out there was no work for them, and they couldn't go back, we didn't have enough of a capital. I think we had about three hundred dollars in savings. So I came out to San Francisco and started to work in the War Relocation Authority office, which was the agency set up to help the evacuees. And I worked for $1440 a year, and managed to support us all, and I supported them until they died.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.