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KL: I know in Portland there were people from the school system or the library or some county people who brought books and supplies and stuff. And it sounds like with your principal coming to visit you, there were some people who were empathic or sympathetic to your situation.
IT: Yeah, right, right. There was, they used to censor the letters, too. My mom, in Minidoka I think it was, I don't know whether she actually wrote to... now, I'm not sure how to say his name, Ickes? He was the Secretary of Interior or whatever who's in charge. I remembered she talked about him and she would write letters, and she would write a letter that she thought would be helpful even on the outside, a Caucasian. But she'd write it so it, he had to read between the lines. And I don't know why she wrote. What could they do?
KL: She wrote to someone in the government, or like a Caucasian friend?
IT: Both, I think. And so she was gonna write to this -- I heard his name on TV, he was Secretary of Interior or something like that. He was kind of in charge.
KL: It was Milton Eisenhower and Dillon Myer who were in charge of the WRA.
IT: Okay, but this guy's name was I-C-K-E-S.
KL: Oh, Ickes. Harold Ickes?
IT: Yeah, yeah. He's in charge of something. And I don't know whether she thought he didn't know what was going on or, well, she was so mad at the way she was treated, we were treated, really.
[Interruption]
KL: Okay, we're back. This is tape number two on October the 13th, 2014. It's Kristen Luetkemeier again, with Irene Tatsuta. And you were talking, when I had to stop tape one, about your mother writing letters to Harold Ickes and other people, and I wondered what more you could tell us about those letters, if you ever saw them or how you knew about them.
IT: I don't think I saw them, but she knew, well, she said she knew they were reading it -- "they" is the government -- and censoring things. Later, somewhere I read that they did do that, I mean they censored the letters that were going back and forth. But I don't even know if she heard from this guy. Later I found out that he was also, he liked the Japanese and some of the people in camp knew this guy.
KL: Did she get responses?
IT: I don't think so. But she just, I guess she just couldn't believe the government because of what they did to us, and nothing seemed believable to her anymore.
KL: I hope you do write for you parents' case files sometimes, because it would be amazing to see copies of those letters, if they survived. I don't know if they would've ever caught up with your mom's record, but...
IT: Would they have copies of the letters?
KL: I don't know. They might have copies of them somehow. I don't know, if she wrote them to the Department of the Interior, I don't know if they ever would've made it back to her record, but it would be incredible to see what she, what she said.
IT: I remembered the name, but I knew it was mispronounced.
KL: Yeah, it's a really unusual name. I mean, there were debates within the president's cabinet about whether this was appropriate or legal.
IT: Yeah.
KL: So it's very, that's interesting that people knew Ickes and, by reputation, and others were talking about --
IT: See, that's what surprised me, because I didn't know my mother knew all this stuff. I mean, even in camp, when she told me she just went to the fifth grade, later I found out she did go to school in Japan, too, but that's not English.
KL: Yeah, she sounds very worldly.
IT: Yeah, and she under-, she seemed to, when she told me she asked for the writ of habeus corpus, I says, "What's that," you know? This is after.
<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.