Densho Digital Archive - Kats Kunitsugu Interview (denshovh-kkats

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FA: Tell us about this essay, how old was she when she wrote this and where?

[Interruption]

PT: Well, my wife was -- and we were not married at the time, of course, she was a teenager and she was slated to graduate from Heart Mountain High School in 1943, which she did. But during the 1981 Commission hearings on the internment in Los Angeles, we started looking through some of our scrapbooks 'cause she had kept some material and I had kept a scrapbook. And she came across an editorial she had written while she was at Heart Mountain and she didn't realize that she had written this essay, because she didn't realize the amount of anger that she had hidden and kept hidden and she was very interested in the euphemism that the teacher used in changing the language of what she had written.

She had written here: "Whenever I hear this word 'evacuation' it brings to my mind masses of people uprooted and torn from comfortable homes, well-established occupations, and friends of long standing. In other words, denied the rights and privilege to live a free life. But more than that, the topic of Americanism arises. Just what does Americanism mean? To me it stands for freedom of worship, religion, speech, press, and the pursuit of happiness which we are fighting for in this global war. Why then were citizens of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes and placed behind barbed wire?"

The teacher changed this wording and inserted this euphemism: "Why then were citizens of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes and placed in relocation centers." And I think that expresses perfectly the tenor of the times, because you must remember that this was fifty years ago and that the Issei were as immigrants denied citizenship, were in a survival mode and mentality, and they hoped to live out, through us, the Nisei, vicariously the things that were unattainable for them. And so we carried into that camp the same kind of mentality and the same kind of values from Japanese culture into the camps, the survival mentality if you will, and that explains a lot of why we did what we did and how we acted as we did under the pressures of the concentration camps.

[Interruption]

FC: The teacher offered some other advice for rewrites?

PT: Yes, she had in here following that statement that I just read, "Rationalize and arrive at a conclusion whereby you can reconcile this seemingly undemocratic act as an act of Americanism." So really the teacher wanted her to turn logic on its head, and that was the position we were in in those camps, and I think that that kind of mentality, a large part of that culturally driven, explains why fifty years after the war, we're still deeply divided as Japanese Americans on the issue of resisters of conscience in the camps.

FC: Is this similar to your experience in Heart Mountain High School? Is this what they were teaching?

KK: I think by and large, the teachers were not firebrands. They were, some of them were there because maybe the pay was better or some were straight out of normal school and were looking for a job, and also a few were inspired to be "good citizens" and "do good to the poor Japanese Americans who are incarcerated," that sort of thing. But as Paul says, the whole atmosphere that we lived in was that we were the weaker and there was a power over us over which we had no control, and to survive we just had to go along, and that was the way it was.