<Begin Segment 14>

AL: Because her name has come up here a number of times, and I was thinking, you know, you come to this reunion, you won't be Jeanne's older brother, you'll be Lillian's little brother because those are her classmates. Or you'll just be Kiyo. So what about... I know in the movie and the book there's a lot where Jeanne talks about when your father came back. Could you tell us from your perspective what you remember of him coming back and who it was that came back?

GW: Well, what I remember, when Dad came back, he was not what you might call warm anymore. He was more like by himself, separated himself, standoffish, you know, wants to be isolated. And that's when he started to brew his own liquor. He made this, in the movie they called it moonshine, but he had a crock pot, and you put fermented rice in it, and you put a stone on it and with a cover, push it down. And what it does is it takes the alcohol out of the rice, and from the rice it drips down and is clear. I think the Koreans called it shochu, rice wine, or rice liquor. Anyway, it's almost a hundred percent alcohol when it drips out, and he was drinking that all the time. And that was when he became alcoholic, like he was drunk all day long. He would cuss at my mom, and that's where the problem became with him and Mom, was he would accuse Mom of infidelity or talking to other men and stuff, because she was working at this other place that they called nutrition because she was a nutrition aide.

Anyway, and the movie depicts my father hitting my mother, and that is true, he did hit my mother. But then it showed me getting up and hitting my father, striking my father, hit him in the nose, but it wasn't me. [Laughs] I was only, what, eleven, maybe twelve years old. Anyway, my brother Ray was living with us at that time, and it was my brother Ray, who was maybe fifteen years old, sixteen, who got up and struck Dad. And I remember that night Jeanne and I were in bed, and we covered up our head. And Dad had this bat in his hand and he's looking for my brother Ray. And Ray by that time fled to my other sister's house. And in the book, Jeanne had to write that... well, at that time when she was writing the book, she asked Ray about, can she write that Ray was the one that hit Dad. But Ray at that time was a Mormon deacon, in the Mormon church, and he didn't want that to be known that he struck Dad. So I think Jeanne asked me if it was okay if she used my name to be the one that hit Dad. I said, "It doesn't bother me at all, that's all right." Because I know I didn't do it. But as far as to keep that in that in the storyline in the book, it's there. But that's what actually happened.

But Dad became an alcoholic and he stayed an alcoholic until we lived in Long Beach when we got out of camp. And one day when I came back from school, Dad used to have this bottle of liquor on the ice box, and every time, in those days, it wasn't a refrigerator, it was an ice box. You put a big ice thing in it. Well, anyway, he had this bottle of liquor on top of the ice box, he would take a swig before he'd go out, take a swig when he comes back in. And then one day I came back from school, I didn't see that bottle there. And I asked Mom, "What happened to that bottle?" "Dad had a stroke today." He had a lifesaving stroke in that he bled through his nose. The, I guess, pressure, let the blood come out of his nose, so he didn't die of a hemorrhage. So the doc told him, "You cannot drink anymore." Lo and behold, the bottle was gone and he became a sober man.

AL: Did he drink before the war?

GW: Oh, yeah. But you know, he wasn't drunk all day long like in camp. He just occasionally, his fisherman buddies would come over and he would drink a lot of beer.

AL: So do you think camp had an impact, you think the camp caused his alcoholism?

GW: I think his experience from when he was in Bismarck... there was a story going around that because Dad could read Japanese and speak English, he was interpreting this American newspaper to the Japanese prisoners that were there with him. And the guys were saying, the prisoners I guess were saying that he wasn't telling them the truth or whatever, so they called him an inu, a rat, or a dog. Inu is another word for dog, so he's like a traitor. So I think when he came back in camp, that was following him. So I think he had a feeling that that would follow him in camp when he's with us, that he's a traitor. That's my thought. And after that he just drank.

AL: So in the movie, it shows the actor coming off, it shows your father, the character, coming off the bus looking twenty years older than he did.

GW: That I can't remember. I don't remember seeing Dad come off the bus or whatever, but I remember seeing him when he's in the barrack with us.

AL: In the, I think it's in the movie, they show that you hit him, not Ray, but that after that, he straightens out, sobers up, puts on his tie and stops drinking. So that's, he did not stop drinking in camp.

GW: No, no. I don't think... maybe he slacked off a little bit, but as far as drinking, because I remember in Long Beach, when we moved to Long Beach, he was still drinking. But he wasn't belligerent to my mom anymore, you know.

AL: Did that change after Ray punched him?

GW: I think so. I think he realized that he shouldn't be doing that to Mom.

AL: What was your mother's response?

GW: That's hard to say. She wasn't very demonstrative or anything like that, so I don't know how Mom felt about that. Like was she gonna leave Dad or whatever, but I don't know.

AL: Do you think it was common in camp to have domestic violence?

GW: I think so. I think our family wasn't, my dad wasn't the only one that had this feeling that they're useless or whatever. Everybody at that age who were in camp. Because they have no job, no way of taking care of the family. It has to be some sort of feeling of uselessness.

AL: Do you know if the community welfare staff ever got involved in your family's situation?

GW: No, I don't think they ever had a community welfare, did they?

AL: They did, and they dealt with domestic abuse and different issues, but I'm sure it's probably like now, you don't know all of it.

GW: Yeah, because I don't think anybody came to our house talking about it or asking us about it, the kids about it.

AL: Was he abusive to your grandmother also?

GW: No. Because I think during camp, the grandmother stayed with my sister Frances. She wasn't in our barracks.

AL: How did her life change when she got her sight back?

GW: I have no idea how she felt. But we felt a lot better because now we didn't have to take her around like you would a blind person, you have to take them everyplace.

AL: Did your mom have much of a social life outside of work?

GW: I don't think so. I don't think anybody in camp had that, mothers at that age had any kind of social life that I know of.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.