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JA: How do you or how did you look at what she was teaching you once you had the experience of being evacuated and going to Manzanar? Did that change your sense of what it meant to be an American?

HT: To be an American?

JA: As she had defined it.

HT: Beg your pardon?

JA: She had defined for you a sense of what it meant to be American, and you believed in it. Did you continue to believe in it throughout your Manzanar experience?

HT: Once we entered it... see, when we were evacuated into Manzanar, number one, we were told the reason why we are being evacuated from the West Coast is to protect us.

JA: I'm going to ask you to tell me that once more because there was a loud plane noise.

HT: The reason why we were evacuated is we were told that we are being evacuated so that the government can protect us. And when I reached Manzanar, and I realized that there were barbed fence, and what struck me was not the barbed fence, but the tower. And the first thing that I had observed was that they had armaments, not facing out, but facing in. Now, what was the armaments facing in when they are supposed to be protecting us? This is the first thing that had come to my mind. I think anyone who saw how the armaments were placed could really see where they want to be having control over. But it makes you doubt, number one, why is the armaments facing inside where we are supposed to be? [Pauses] But when you're, when you're going to a place like that, you can't argue. You just have to live with it.

JA: But you can reevaluate things in your mind.

HT: Yes, certainly does. But even then, you know, in spite of everything that I had seen, I still believed in what Mrs. McDougall had constantly told us. You know when you're a kid, I don't know no other things other than why, what I am experiencing right there and then as a child. I don't know any other things. So to this very day, Mrs. McDougall is still embedded in me.

JA: That's great.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.