<Begin Segment 6>

Q: Gordon, do you remember, at any time did your parents say anything about what you were doing back in '42?

GH: Yes, I think the parents, my parents... no, I don't think I took stands completely independent of the kind of philosophy my parents had. So they understood and in fact, in principle, they supported me, but they wanted me to hold that principle in abeyance under these circumstances so that we could be together, not knowing where they were gonna go and not knowing what was gonna happen to me when I refused. And as my mother emotionally put it, we may never see each other again. And so she said the family should come first. So they begged me to hold off my protest, but when I was unable to do that, they without hesitation supported me all through the situation.

JH: I think it should be pointed out here also that he, Gordon being the firstborn son in an immigrant family, plays a specific and special role in the adjustment that Japanese families are making to the society here. So that I think it's very important for them to have him with us during the time of the crisis.

GH : I was helped a little by the fact that my next brother had just graduated high school and Jim was second year in high school, so that physically, at least, they weren't left on their own, so it put my mind to ease to some extent on that aspect.

Q: Did you remember any exchange with your father, what he said?

GH: Yeah, my father was less articulate than my mother on these things, but he was standing right there and they spoke as a team. I always felt that... one experience in, while I was in jail, I would correspond, she would write to me in the simple Japanese phonetics called katakana, and I'd respond accordingly. In one of the letters, she said that a couple of ladies from California who were in Tule Lake in a block about a mile and half away, trudged all the way out to knock on her door because they heard that the son of that family was in jail, refusing to go with this process of uprooting. And she said when these people came just to say thank you, she said that gave her a big lift. And I then, I didn't... felt no longer any kind of concern over what I did and not being with the family because I didn't think anything I ever could've done could have given her that kind of lift.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.