<Begin Segment 21>

RM: Pat, I wanted to ask how you felt when you found out that Paul wasn't your dad.

PS: Well, actually, I was at that age where I was angry about a lot of things because my dad didn't let us do a lot of things, he was pretty strict. So I thought, "He's torturing us because we're not his biological children." [Laughs] "He's trying to torture us." You know, it's the logic of a young teenager. And my sister and I would discuss this, yeah, because we had two of us to discuss this and decide that this is why he was doing this to us, making us stay home and not go out and have a good time, where he's really looking after our welfare. We were only allowed to go out once a week. We had to be home by eleven, and it didn't make any difference if we went with our girlfriends or a boyfriend. So it was pretty strict there. And even before that, we had to be home by, we had to be able to sit at the dinner table at five o'clock, those were the rules.

RM: I wonder if they were influenced by the way that in camp a lot of families lost that dinner at five together with the family kind of thing.

PS: I don't know. It was really important that we were at the dinner table. And then we did all our chores, and we couldn't go out and do anything until we finished doing what we were supposed to do first.

RM: Did your mom try to explain... I mean, you had your theory that he was torturing you, but how did your mom talk to you about the --

PS: She didn't really say anything other than that the dad we thought was our dad really was not our dad, it was our stepfather.

RM: So she didn't try to tell you why.

PS: Uh-uh, because we didn't know about camp. See, we did not know about camp life.

RM: So did you know that camp had happened at all?

PS: No. Because I think I mentioned to her once in junior high school, there was like a little blurb in the history book, and she just kind of pooh-poohed it, said, "Oh, it was nothing." Because I remember asking her, "They're saying something about some sort of camp." She said, "Oh." And so I never asked her again.

RM: And none of your friends' families talked about it?

PS: Nobody ever talked about the camps.

RM: And I take it Paul didn't say anything about it either.

PS: No.

RM: So when, how old were you when you found out that your family had been incarcerated?

PS: I'll bet you I was... I don't know, I had to be pretty old. I would have had to have been fairly old, because the pilgrimages started, and then it came out that Sueko was working for the reparation, my mother was all for this, and we'd have to know what the reparation was about.

RM: Yeah, right.

PS: So by then I'm pretty old, I've got to be in my twenties.

RM: Wow. So it's really interesting to me that... because I always sort of link Ku Sakamoto and Sue Kunitomi in my mind a little bit.

PS: They were totally separate.

RM: Like, your mom didn't talk about it at all, on the other hand.

PS: Sueko was very verbal about it and wanted people to know about it.

RM: Did they ever... did Sue ever try to get your mom to talk?

PS: Yes, and Sueko used to always say to me, "You know, I always try and get your mom involved in some conversation or tell her experience, that she needs to talk about it, and she can let it go." She said, "But she won't say anything." She was silent. Even when I first started taking my mom, she never, all I knew is that we had to go to the pilgrimage. And I think I started going, it's got to be over ten years. How long has Sueko been gone? Because I was taking her before she passed away. Because Sueko's the one that asked me to start taking my mother. Because she said, "Your mother, I can't leave her alone and I have too much to do with the pilgrimage." My mother used to always ride up with her.

<End Segment 21> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.