<Begin Segment 28>

RP: Shig, do you have any other stories that we haven't shared yet, that you'd like to share, about anything.

SK: Oh. About the life?

RP: Camp, or otherwise. Before we complete.

SK: You know, people say it was a horrible life. Well, it was, you know, for especially our parents. And they say, a lot of good came out of it, they say. But I always thought of it this way, it opened up a lot of fields for people because of what the 442nd did and what people have struggled through, have been good workers and all that. But it never mentions too much about what the government did. And a hysteria war, even the president and attorney general, they got caught up in this field of hysteria. And they're all decent people. So, if it happens again, this is what's going to happen again, against the Muslims.

RP: Do you feel like it is happening again?

SK: Yes, well, it does, because that's human nature. I think it's strange, it's human nature. And, I'm not Republican. Are you Republican? Anyway, wonder what's happening to our world that's going on right now. Now we take the attitude that we should lead all the democratic countries into becoming democratic, and we're making a kind of a mess of it. Because people that we're training tell people that been generations ahead of us becoming democratic here. That's fine for our life. But do we have the right to interfere with their life and tell them how to live? Sure it's wrong, some parts of it is wrong, and I feel that's true with any democratic country anyway, the way we treat the blacks. They say, blacks are the burden of the white Americans. But it could be the other way, too. To the blacks, the whites are the burden. I don't feel that way about it, because we share a lot of good things that the white people and the Asians, people now. But when my parents came here in the early 1900s, there was a lot of "Yellow Peril." And people in California that just hated the Chinese and Japanese, because of the way they acted. They never assimilated with the white, they had no chance because they didn't know the language. But that happened to all people that immigrated, the Irish, the Italian, they all formed their own communities. They don't live with everybody else. That's the same, except the skin was white. So that seems to be the criteria, if you look like something, that's what you are. [Laughs] That's my epilogue.

KP: Great, that's perfect. We're out of tape.

RP: Thank you.

<End Segment 28> - Copyright © 2007 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.