<Begin Segment 17>

RP: So what, as a final sort of wrap up question, Fumie, what advice would you offer to young people today in terms of trusting your government or fighting for your rights, speaking out? And you're a great example of all those.

FS: Well, you know, the Florin JACL chapter has held a lot of little workshops for the young kids, and it's amazing because we asked them, "What would you do if this happened to you today?" And most of 'em said, "We don't want to go to jail, so we'll just go to internment." Which really surprised us because being third or fourth generation, we figured they'd be fighting harder than we were. And yet, they don't understand why the Nisei "obediently" obeyed the government and did what they were told to do. And they can't understand why we didn't fight it. But yet, when we asked them, "What would you do?" They said, "We don't want to go to prison so we'll just go to camp." And that kind of puzzled us. But I think there's a lot of people who have not been speaking about their internment because the pain is just too much for them to repeat again. And a lot of people don't know that their grandparents were interned. I know this one Latin American Peruvian daughter was at a workshop at Time of Remembrance with Grace Shimizu, and she came home and told her mother, "Did you know what happened to the Latin American Peruvians?" And she says, "Honey, your grandfather and I were interned." And she says, "I never knew it. I was a sophomore in college before I found out that my grandparents had been interned along with my mother," because no one had spoken about it. So I think as the Nisei generation are now dying off, we have to get our stories out. Because the young ones will never know unless they hear it from us. And I think more and more now, they're coming out and they're asking about internment. And they're doing high school papers on internment and different things. But the history books haven't contributed anything to it. And I'm sure Sarah Palin being the first woman vice presidential candidate is going to make, is going to make history books. But I think the internment has to make the history books also. And I think they said there was one paragraph in the history book about internment. And that certainly doesn't speak for everything that's happened.

But I've run across so many people who have said they didn't know about the Japanese railroad workers. They knew about the Chinese railroad workers building the continental railway, but they didn't know Japanese worked on the railroad. So I think it's a story that we all have to get written up and have there for our grandchildren, our children.

RP: Why do you -- was it an issue of awareness that Japanese railroad workers and mine workers weren't included in the original Civil Liberties Act legislation?

FS: When I was in Washington, a JACL person came up and said, "Fumie, we didn't know about the railroad workers or we would have included you." But I'm not so sure, because when they went for reparations for internment, it was so far out that everybody said, "It'll never happen." So they had to narrow it down. From what I understand, they had included all these Alaskans and the Latin American Peruvians, but they thought, "We've got to get a bill that will be sure to get through," so they cut out a lot of people, and they centered it on internment so they could get something through. And with that, it opened the gates and the doors for everybody else, but they said that they didn't cover it because if they made it too elaborate, it wouldn't fly in Congress. So I don't know if they really would have included the railroads. They excluded the Peruvians who were included at the very beginning. But they did say, "We didn't know about you." And I think it's true with anything else, no one wants to go around telling people that, "My father was fired," or, "My uncle was fired," or, "My brother was fired," you know, by the government. So in a way, it's the Japanese way to be haji, kind of embarrassed by it. Gaman, which means to suffer and persevere, and I think this is true of all the Japanese people. It probably won't be true of our Sansei and Yonsei generation, but it's certainly true of the Issei and Niseis. But like we say, the Niseis are all dying off now. So I receive the Pacific Citizen, and I think there were three World War II military men who passed away. You know, I mean, the 442nd is just disappearing. I have a friend in Blackfoot, Idaho, who was a member. He says, "There's only two of us left in our unit." So I think we've got to get the word out and get it into history books, and make it well-known on the East Coast. There's a lot of people living on the East Coast, New Jersey, because of the frozen food company there. I have relatives in Chicago that would not come back to California after internment. They said the discrimination was so bad, they just didn't want to come back, so they settled back east. But evidently, they're not talking about internment either because the East Coast, people do not know what internment is. Bill Lann Lee said he wasn't aware of it until one of his college friends talked about it and took him to visit an internment camp. So we've got to educate everybody on this.

RP: Hopefully our interview today will impact in that direction. Thank you so much for your time today and your special story.

FS: I hope so. And thank you very much for helping us tell our story.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.