<Begin Segment 11>

KL: Were you gonna say something else, too, about how Manzanar shaped your thinking about...

MJT: One thing I remember is that the day I left Manzanar, and as I walked from behind the barbed wire fence and passed the guards at the entryway, and I turned around and all the kids were there, their bodies pressed against the wire fence. And as the bus came by, it was a commercial bus that was going from L.A. to Reno, and it was just so, the bus came and stopped, and I got on, and they, all those kids that were there at the fence, plus Mary and my parents and other people and so on were waving goodbye. I said, "By the grace of God, I will do everything in my power that this will not ever happen again." Unfortunately, it has repeated itself, and the most recently, we don't know how many Muslims were taken because they were Muslims, were taken in our, under come kind of incarceration today. Just like we didn't know how many Japanese were picked up in the middle of the night. I remember in West Los Angeles, someone said that Sakamoto-san was taken up, and Sakamoto, Mr. Sakamoto I knew very well. He was a man in his late seventies. They came and picked him up and took him away, and we don't know how much of that is even going on today, and that can be frightening.

KL: I was amazed when you said that you left in January of 1943 because that seems early. But your sister had already left to go to Drake. When did she leave?

MT: She left in December, I believe, and she was the first one to get permission to go out to school.

KL: How did she arrange that?

MT: Well, she wrote letters, and my father did have connections with some connected people and people in the Christian church, so she wrote to those office to get help, and it was accepted. And Drake University was a Disciple university. In those days, a lot of denominations had schools under their sponsorship, and Drake happened to be a Disciple Christian sponsored university. And so that was by writing to the heads of these office of that denomination, she got a scholarship to go.

KL: So she was a student there?

MT: Yes. She transferred from UCLA to Drake.

KL: And then you were there a month later.

MJT: Yes, I came. It was Florence who encouraged me to go to, to consider Drake. So I had worked, when I got into Manzanar and saw what it was like I said, first I said I'm going to get out. And it took me seven months to run all the papers through and get the okay, both from the school and from other authorities and so on, that I was granted what's called an educational leave.

KL: What did Florence say to you both about Drake and about Des Moines?

MJT: That it was cold in Iowa.

KL: I've lived in Nebraska, I know it's cold in Iowa.

MJT: I left Manzanar when it was just cold. When I got to Iowa, it was snowing, and I was cold.

KL: What did she think about the academics there or about people's response to her? I mean, it's pretty northern European in Iowa, I imagine even more in the '40s.

MJT: I've always said that once the Iowans got to know you, there was nothing that they would not do for you. But it took a while for them to get to know you. But once they got to know who you were...

MT: They were very genuine.

MJT: Yeah, they were genuine people.

KL: How quickly did you join Florence and Jack there?

MT: March, in March of '43.

MJT: Then eventually I brought my mother and dad from Poston, and my brother, older brother. You all had to have jobs. You couldn't leave the camp without a guaranteed job on the outside. So once I got out, I began working on that, trying to find work for my brother and my folks.

KL: What did people back in Manzanar say about Florence's and Jack's departures?

MT: Well, they thought, "Good, you can get out and continue your education."

MJT: There were three ways that you could get out of Manzanar. One way was to volunteer for the beet, sugar beet crew and go to Idaho and dig sugar beets. Second was to join the army, and lot of 'em did volunteer into the army. Then the third was educational leave, getting an education permit. So those were avenues that were open to you if you wanted to make any of those choices.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.