<Begin Segment 18>

KL: What do you think your parents thought about the camp? I mean, I've read kind of that your dad, you know, he says his overall reaction to the evacuees is they were just folks like you and me. And I'm kind of curious, what about his background, since I assume Japanese American and Japanese people were different to him. What do you think caused him to react that way?

WJ: He was a good guy.

DW: He was that kind of person. Yes, he loved to visit with people, he liked people.

JJ: I think his... he was so overcome by the grace that they put up with, presented themselves with -- and this was just from reading his final summation -- to put an American-born citizen through all this, and for them not to be just totally ruined forever in their attitude about America, but they accepted with grace. And I think he was really respectful that they could do that. Because I think his feeling was, "I couldn't do that. If you were doing this to me, I don't know that I would have this kind of grace to accept this." And they did it and did it well. One of the greatest decorated units in the whole war was Japanese, that most had been in these camps. Speaks very well for them as a people.

KL: What was your mom's response to the camp and the situation and the people?

WJ: I think she was totally supportive of the people, and I think that's why she was working with them so much. And I just, I remember this just from knowing my mom, and from other stories, I don't have personal memories of it at all. I think she would have been anything, or would have done anything she could have done to help them in their situation, to make it better for them. She was a big fan of FDR. I'm not going to say Dad was, too, but I don't know that she ever really accepted that this was something that FDR should have done. Although in my own mind, I'm not sure he had much choice. Because the animosity you saw in McGehee on the signs was ten times worse out on the West Coast.

JJ: Maybe a hundred or a thousand times worse.

WJ: They were ready to start carrying guns and shooting 'em on sight. So part of it was just to quell that possible riots, and part of it was the army decided there's liable to be spies in there. But we didn't move the Italians off the coast, or Germans.

DW: Well, no, but you know what's funny, is we forget in all this that Dyess, where we were, Eleanor Roosevelt visited in our house, you know. But anyway...

WJ: She spent the night in our house. Not while we were there.

DW: Not while were living there, it was the guest house. But anyway, right outside that area, there were German prisoner of war camps and Italian prisoner of war camps, Grant's dad administered one of the German ones. And then that doesn't get... I don't remember people getting all upset about that, but maybe I was too little.

WJ: Did they work on the local farms?

DW: Yeah, they were working on the farms. But anyway, we started that off with... I got sidetracked.

KL: Well, he was talking about Roosevelt, too, and just how long that administration was, too.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2012 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.