<Begin Segment 18>

KL: When did, you mentioned earlier that you sort of were part of this attitude of just letting criticism or discrimination roll off your back. When did that change for you, and how?

SM: Yeah. Probably, just thinking off the top of my head, probably two things. One was the Christian faith I was brought up with, in terms of social issues, it didn't help me deal with that. It was sort of rationalizing everything going on and not really calling a spade a spade, and one of the things that I had to unlearn was, I was hearing things from the Christian, the more conservative groups, or maybe typical Christian attitude, trying to learn the Christian understanding, was that these things like the camp, it really was a blessing in design. God meant it to be a blessing. After all, we started a Christian church in Arkansas, and young people were able to go to the East Coast to colleges and find jobs, so instead of being stuck in California -- it wouldn't have been a ghetto, but some people said we didn't want, we'd be in a ghetto if it didn't happen, but we got scattered to the, all these different camps and then went to the East Coast. And so people were saying, and the elderly who worked so hard didn't have anything to do in the camp, so it was a wonderful vacation and they learned crafts and arts, so it was really a blessing, is what I'm hearing. Especially, well, from Christians, too many Christians, and then from those who're rationalizing. Like one of the wonderful lawyers in Utah, Ray Uno, he was from our church in Ogden, his mother was a member of our church and one day I was asking her, "What was it like when you had to go to camp?" She said, "Well, when we were told that we'd be put into the camp, the city official --" apparently she had some friendship with a city official -- "the city official in L.A. came to visit me and he said, 'Mrs. Uno, you worked so hard all your life. This is your time to have a wonderful vacation, so you should enjoy yourself.'" And I asked Mrs. Uno, "How did you feel when he told you that?" And I, it just blew my mind when she said, "I was so grateful to him for being so kind to me." And I wasn't expecting that, but then I realized, anyway, that's how she responded. But anyway, so there was that kind of theological way of dealing with the camps.

The second thing -- and I was learning to, well, I was growing in my faith and I was finding that all of, many of the things I was being taught was just not true at all. My mentors in high school said, "See those Mennonites and those Quakers? They're just religious people. They're not born-again Christians. We're the real Christians, Bible carrying, waving Christians. "Those people are just religious people." And then they said, "See those Methodists, those Presbyterians, they wear robes and they have all the regalia of looking religious, but they're not really born-again Christians like we are." But that's what I was brought up with. Then I went to college, and who were the ones who stood up for justice and for the Japanese? It was the Quakers, and some Mennonite people and the major denominations. It was the Bible-waving Christians who said, "We don't want you in our church. You're a Jap." And so I said gee, I mean, it didn't make sense, what I was taught and what I was learning, and what was really happening. And so I had to, began to unlearn a lot of my theology. The other thing was when people used to ask me, "When you were in camp, what was it like?" Well, I had learned to say, "Well, that wasn't good, but you know, I think it was a blessing in disguise. Our family became Christian in Arkansas. If we were in Caruthers we probably would be Buddhist."

But in 1961 or so it was, I was watching Walter Kronkite, who, it must've been the first documentary and it was on Tanforan. And I remember Tanforan, and Mine Okubo -- was she the artist? -- being among those being interviewed, and they're talking about getting a sack and filling it with straw, which I remember doing. And then seeing what I never went through, they were sweeping out the horse stalls with all the manure and the stench and trying to eradicate the stench of these horse stalls, and as I sat there watching the TV in my living room, I felt my blood start to boil. And I said, how could this happen in America? How could this happen in America? I was really angry that such a thing had happened. It's as if, for the first time, I get in touch with how I felt, and so ever since then, when someone asks me, "What was it like in camp?" Not once would I say, "Well, you know, it was a blessing in disguise." I said, "It was wrong, wrong, wrong." But you have to keep that separate from the courage and the faith and the determination it took for those people to go through it and still come out feeling strong. And I was riding with a passenger on a flight from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, and my seatmate was a Nisei fellow and he was saying to me that -- he was in New York, he had a job there, went to school there, and he said, "You know, camp was a blessing in disguise. If it weren't for my being, going, my being sent to the camp, I wouldn't have gone to university in New York or gotten this job, and now I fly back and forth on this jet plane." And I said, "You know what? If we weren't put into the camp you might be owning this jet plane you're flying in." And he didn't say a word. He had nothing to say. We just kept quiet all the way into San Francisco. [Laughs]

KL: How long was the rest of that plane ride?

SM: It was longer than, I guess, for him. But anyway, so that was the beginning of my sensing that this was not a, not only not a blessing in disguise, that it was something that... and of course, that was the '60s, with the blacks revolting, demanding justice. And like a typical Nisei, I was afraid to speak up for them or stand with them or march with them, so I was one of those quiet, timid Niseis, which was the most, ninety-nine percent of us. But I would listen to these speakers, and I remember some of them saying things like, to the majority group, "We don't need you. You need us." Which was never, I never heard something like that, you know? Like, "You need to help us to get us up to the top. Stop discriminating against us." But what I heard them saying was, "We're not, the problem isn't with our being down here. The problem is your thinking that we're not as good as you and that we should be like you people."

I sort of transcribed all of this into my own interpretation, and I came up with this new paradigm. The old paradigm is, here's a ladder, and there's people at the top and there's people at the bottom, and the idea is to try to get these people to come up the ladder and to be like them up there. Well, the trouble was these people were up there because they'd been stepping on these people down here to get there, and to have these people come up and step on those people so they can be up there wasn't solving anything. And the new paradigm, I suddenly realized, was a horizontal line. Here's the middle, that's human, the way God created us to be, fully human. These people on this side, whether it's left or right, if they think they're better than those people on that side, they're no better than those people because this is where they need to be. And those people don't have to be like them; they need to come to be fully human and be recognized for all their, who they are. And so that's something that I began to realize. It's not trying to go up the ladder. And then recently I shared, after I shared this talk at Tule Lake, someone from Portland wanted my talk and then she said, "You said something, I kept wondering where I heard that before." And she said, "I realized what it was." It's the title of the book, I think, is Clueless at the Top. The people at the top have no clue as to what the problem is. And I don't know if you've ever heard the book, but I just ordered it, and it's sort of a general idea, those at the top cannot be there unless you have these people at the bottom, and these people just don't understand why being up there is not the epitome of human achievement and so forth. And so she shared that, the book title with me. But anyway, so that's sort of changed my whole outlook about the, what happened to us and about the Christian faith was, it's somewhat true was Karl Marx said, it's an opiate for the people. It just keeps the people subservient to whoever is dictating the theology, and of course, so much of our, for me, for the Christian belief is so cultural. It had nothing to do with the bible teaching, it has everything to do with the culture that we're brought up in, which tries to validate or rationalize what we believe today, about the gays or minority groups or whatever.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.