Densho Digital Archive
Manzanar National Historic Site Collection
Title: Marion I. Masada Interview
Narrator: Marion I. Masada
Interviewer: Kristen Luetkemeier
Location: Fresno, California
Date: September 10, 2014
Densho ID: denshovh-mmarion-01-0029

<Begin Segment 29>

KL: What about Tule Lake?

MM: Tule Lake.

KL: How did you guys become involved out there?

MM: Well, we needed to find out about the no-no's and the resisters and those who were so ostracized by our own people. We needed to find out their stories, so we committed to go there and find out. And we heard such stories of the family being divided, how difficult it was. It wasn't an easy thing, and to be criticized and ostracized by your own people for some, for the battles within families, the struggles that they had? That's terrible. It's terrible to turn your back on them when they struggled to make these kind of decisions. And it took courage, it took courage on their part to resist when all the others went ahead and said yes-yes, and these few said no-no, "Restore our rights first as citizens. Restore us, free us from this camp and then we'll go fight, we'll do anything you say." I mean, it was wrenching, it was heart-wrenching to hear these stories. And we honor these people, really. They did something which was the most difficult decision to make, and yet, because they believed in it so strongly that they resisted.

KL: Are there people or experiences from the Tule Lake pilgrimage that really stay with you, like the ones you had in Utah or in, like with Jane Beckwith or meeting Rosalie Gould? Are there are individuals or are there encounters you had during -- you guys have been to ten pilgrimages of Tule Lake, or for ten years?

MM: No, we went to about four pilgrimages. And so people like Hiroshi Kashiwagi, who wrote plays about camp and everything, and he wrote stories, he wrote poems... and then Hiroshi Shimizu, and he was born in Tule Lake and so their heart is with this Tule Lake pilgrimage. And then there was Stanley Shikuma of Seattle, he started a taiko drum group, and Stanley was one of my Sunday school students when we were in Watsonville that one year, and he was a little boy in short pants and his name was Porky. The cutest little boy he was, and here he is, now bringing a taiko drum group, I mean, it's just mind-boggling to see this little image of this boy turning out like this and so into taiko and the meaning of the taiko drums. I wrote a poem about the taiko drums this last pilgrimage, because I said, "I got it! I got it! The drums beating louder and louder, they got a message to say." And I said, what's the message? What's the message? "Hear our stories," why we resisted and all these things, it just came out of my, my thoughts, and I started writing down, "And the drums beat louder," and then I'd say something else then, "The drums kept beating." I said, "I got it! I got it!" That's how I ended the poem. It was so powerful, I mean to me, just how I, how I perceived those drums to mean to me.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.