Densho Digital Archive - John Nakada Interview (denshovh-njohn-01-0016)

<Begin Segment 16>

RP: Did your parents encourage their sons to join the military?

JN: My father told all my brothers that, "You should join the army, join the army. Because you're an American and even though we're in camp, you're still an American so go into (army)." So I don't know. That's better than a lot of parents that are outside of the camp.

RP: And some parents received sort of negative reactions about that in some of the camps, you know, that they had encouraged their sons to go to the army and there were other people in the block that didn't quite agree with that attitude.

JN: Yeah, they had a questionnaire before they did that, you probably heard about that.

RP: The "loyalty questions."

JN: Yeah, "loyalty question" and the two questions they had was would you fight for any enemy, will you fight for America or and the other one was would you be loyal to the emperor of Japan. And those are the two questions that were in question. And if you said no to both of them, they had a group they called the "no-no boys" and so they were actually the ones that went to you know, went to prison out of the camp. Or they were put into a different camp.

RP: Tule Lake.

JN: So that's kind of the way it was there.

RP: Do you remember that "loyalty questionnaire"? I know you were too young to have to answer the questions but --

JN: You had to be... I wasn't... I think you had to be seventeen and even the women had to answer that question.

RP: Do you remember when the questionnaire went around and if there was a discussion within your family or some of the other?

JN: Yeah, there were a lot of discussions and questions and everything. And a lot of the people that did that, they didn't like the idea that there was kind of a prejudice right in the camp there, some of the people that said, you know, didn't answer the question, the other one yeah, yeah, okay. So there was friction right in the camp there.