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ET: Well, I'll start. [Laughs] It was something that... totally new experience, anything that happened. It's during my university days, so I quit just before starting the third year at the University of Washington. And we didn't know just exactly what's going to happen from day to day. So the talk of evacuation or internment camp, of course, started around the same time. War was going, it was pretty furious, but we didn't really feel that, according to the news, newspaper, all these anti-Japanese American movement. Wasn't quite the way we expected. I think there were a number of friends at the school, teachers, they were very sympathetic about the whole thing, and I think maybe that we were, started to, to feel the thing we talked about, is something that we cannot help ourselves, we just have to kind of go along with what the government is doing, and we will follow the order. It's not the time to really exercise our civil rights around that time. I don't think we fully understood what that civil rights was at the time. So we just, just left it up to what's happening. We followed a lot of it from immediate, the people around us telling, you know, what should be done, and in order to help the situation, we did cooperate with the authorities. And just maintained the idea of nothing could be done.

It's a very helpless feeling at the time, this is what, where I used that word: shikata ga nai. And that feeling is, is there's very much nothing you could do, it's helpless. But you just have to keep it to yourself, to... it's kind of a gaman, is the word that they use a lot. It's patience, but it's more calculated perseverance than anything. So that you have a hope in the future. The best is to, of course, not to fight the time. I think you've seen that happen. Maybe we were too peaceful at the time, I don't know. I don't think any time during that three-and-a-half years I had -- totally, actually, it's about two years, your incarceration of Japanese Americans into internment camp. And not really that we know that happened against United States or anything. I think it's, it's a totally, it's a cooperation from evacuees, or like ours, but yet, we always felt that there is a hope and a brighter thing in the future, and that kind of kept us going. So like you said, how would you like to spend that time? I think you just have to take the best, you might say, shot. This is, this is where the, eventually, the Japanese Americans came and they made a movie of how Japanese American soldiers performed in Europe, it's called Go For Broke. [Laughs] Go For Broke has, very typically, it's our Japanese Americans who loved some of these gambling or crap-shooting slogan, "go for broke," came out of Hawaii, and I think it's typically, it's a good, through little steps we did have this, is a very helpless feeling, nothing you could do to persevere, the chance. Then there was the opportunity to serve in the front line combat team and "go for broke."

And so that is what really kept us going. I don't think we really had the real bad experience. I don't think government can ever really put us through any type of torture experience of any kind. We probably were a little bit more opportunist, maybe, and took advantage of whatever it was given to us to make it better for our, for our life. But there was a tremendous amount of cooperations and help, help each other during that time.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.