Densho Digital Archive - Art Imagire Interview (denshovh-iart-01-0021)

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RP: Mary was also a focal point for efforts to begin preserving histories and interviews and...

AI: Oh, yeah. Yes, she was. And she... I don't know whether she was instrumental in Sacramento State College has quite a huge archive. I think she helped there. She was a very active proponent of reparations. Yeah, testifying in Congress and all that sort of thing.

RP: Right. You weren't in camp, but were you involved in that effort at all?

AI: No, not really. We didn't, didn't get into that fully. But...

RP: But your wife got an apology and a check?

AI: Yeah. We both one. And my brother. And the thing I was concerned about, I said, "Oh, my gosh." I said, "How are we gonna prove we did that?" When... that we left. And they said, they said, "Well, anybody went under the order of 9066, you're eligible." And so I called the ORA, that was in charge of that. And I gave, I said, "Now, I don't know how I'm gonna... how am I supposed to prove this?" And they said, "What's your name?" And I said, "Imagire." And they said, "Oh, that's okay, you're gonna get a check." So, somehow they knew. I don't know whether my folks had to apply, an application, or what. And I don't know... I looked for, through all their records and everything and I don't, I don't see any evidence of that.

RP: Boy, I just learned something really, really important. I always thought it was just people who had gone to camp. It was also folks who --

AI: Yeah. We, we got--

RP: -- left, voluntarily relocated?

AI: Yeah, left voluntarily. And they knew, yeah. Another interesting thing you might not know is... and I forget when this is. Maybe this was about the same time they were allowed to become citizens, about '58 or something like that. Is that when it was?

RP: A little earlier. '52.

AI: '52. The government allowed the Japanese people to sue them. And my folks applied and hired a lawyer and they, and they got a check I remember for $750 or something like that for that. So we kind of got a double payment. [Laughs] But you know, $750 wasn't very much.

KP: Was that the thing that was set up to, if you lost property...

AI: Yeah. Lost property, yeah. There's so many incidences, you probably heard incidences of people lost their business and everything.

RP: Right.

AI: I don't know whether you've heard of this story or not but there's a family in Richmond, California, the big rose nursery called... it's the Ninomiya family. And when the war started they, they turned their property over to their competitor that was across the street, Mr. Abey. And when they, when they came back, he gave 'em a check for all the profit they had made and they got their thing entirely back. And they, just now they're closing it down because the father's died, the son's died, and there's only three girls left. They finally closed the nursery. They had a huge nursery. Several hundred hothouses and it was sad for them because they leased it out for a while and then... to an outfit called Color Spot. I don't know whether you heard of them, but whenever you go to a store there's Color Spot. And they leased it out to them and then when they closed the contract, they put the place up for sale. And they didn't realize it, but they were getting robbed. They would come in and pull all the copper wires out of the hothouses and copper is expensive so they'd save it for the metal. And they stripped most all of the hothouses and they didn't realize it until the one remaining hothouse that they had, they were using for their own personal use. They lost all the power, all the wiring out of that and they had to get it all rewired. So they had to hire security to watch the place until they sold it, until they got rid of it. But that was, to me, an amazing story of how a Japanese family was able to regain what they had lost, 'cause so many people lost their property and never got it back. Yeah.

RP: So what, what do you share with your daughters relative to your experience and your wife's experience?

AI: You know, I was just thinking about that. And I don't, even, we're thinking about the grandchildren... how we see all these young kids coming and, and taking in all this... the kids that went out to the Amache trip and everything. We have never thought to include them in that, but we're thinking, I'm thinking, gosh, we should. To continue this, to this... keep the story going, I guess. I don't... when I talk to my daughter I say, "Oh yeah, I went to Amache." She said, "Amache, I never heard of Amache." I says, oh well. We'll teach you when you get, when we get back. So I guess we weren't very good at that.