<Begin Segment 22>

MS: Yes, because I did know the Free Press group too. You know, Sue Embrey. There was a, Chiz Mori, I think that was her name. Chiz Mori. Was it Chiz Mori? Yes. She came to New York, too, you know. And I saw here there.

RP: What do you remember about Sue?

MS: Yeah, I actually don't remember that much about Sue. I think I remember more about Chiz. But, Sue was always very... I kind of liked the whole Free Press bunch, you know. [Laughs]

RP: Did you ever imagine Sue leading an effort to preserve Manzanar?

MS: No. No, I wasn't thinking that far ahead. [Laughs] Oh, she herself didn't, I don't think. Until, let's see, what was it? When did you, when did... did she ever tell you what triggered that, you know? Oh dear, I think she told me once, and I... oh dear. I mean, she was always I think had that tendency anyway. But I think there was something that did trigger it. And a lot of, a lot of individuals did have un-resolved feelings of either, you know, resentment or bitterness or anger or, or something. And you had to work it through. And I worked it through conscientiously. It took me two years. Well, two years was the breaking of the... and I had to work through a lot. And I realized that a lot of people had not. And that some of them, in their later lives, something did trigger it and then they had to do something with it. And in that sense, some went into a new form of activism or, or resolved it in other ways. And then if you didn't, it just stayed inside of you as a, kind of a negative binding force, I called it, energy. Because you have that repressed or, you know, you hadn't worked it through to know what you were gonna do with it. And, uh-huh.

RP: How did you work it though?

MS: Well, I think when I got out and I thought about it, and I said, "I was put into a camp as an American citizen, which is against the Constitution because I no due process." I was really... but, it was only because of my ancestry. And I know absolutely nothing about my ancestry, nothing about, you know, very little about the family, and nothing about the culture and nothing except what you gather through your reading, just generally, or in school, generally. And so I thought I'm gonna go back to college and I'm gonna focus on Japan. So, I was drawn to the New School at the time. Because the New School was setup for a serious people. I mean people who were not there for the college life. It was really to get some of the benefits of a learning situation. And you had to be twenty-five years old. And it was really set up by professors from Columbia University for working people. And so the classes started, well, then the classes started about four, but really, it was in the evening. And they gave no degrees. You were just there to learn. I thought that would be good because I certainly wasn't interested in, in any college life. So I went and I applied for a scholarship since I wouldn't be able to afford anything. They gave me a full scholarship. 'Course, I sent them transcripts and everything. And, I had always had adequate grades, had good grades. But, they were particularly concerned too with the German situation. And they had tried to pull out as German Jews as they could. And so many of their professors, actually, were German and some of the, some of their students, too, were German ancestry. And they were good students. Really, much more serious I found than in Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, they, they came from Europe. So they had a different tradition. And we had only six hundred people. That was our student body.

And when they, and so I wrote. And gave my transcripts and all and mentioned that I had been in, just come out of the camps and all. And, they were very sympathetic and they gave me a full scholarship. [Laughs] Which was wonderful. And so for every class I wrote a paper on Japan. If I was in a sociology class, I'd, you know, psychology, whatever. And I remember in my sociology class, I wrote a paper on the camps and a lady who had been in one of the German camps and had, had gotten out, I don't know how they got out. But she had been a newspaper publisher, I think, something. And everybody was everybody was older at that time. They're not young students or anything. And I mentioned that one of the psychological effects I recognized in camp was this, uh, what shall I, the collapsing, actually, of your universe. And so the things that you were interested in, the things that you were involved in and aware of and all that, things that you were doing, now had been eliminated and condensed to camp. And the camp situation, the conversation from the beginning became much more constricted and eventually it was like: what is the best mess hall to go to today? And it was discussion on that kind of a level which really shocked me because they were persons of education. They, but there was this tremendous constriction and uh, and it was only, it was only when you were able to get... I don't know, if something started you on something and if there was a little group that could focus on something, then you had a, a discussion or something. But, the whole atmosphere was, well, it was really a lessening of a human being you became.

But anyway, I wrote as many papers as I could, looking at Japan. I was learning. And then it was time to write a thesis and I hadn't... and I said well, the only thing I haven't looked at is the religions. I had kind of written papers on so many other things. And so I thought, well, I'll just write a, I'll explore the religion. And then I was interested in okay, now what, what was the source of my mother's strength, inner strength? And in the psychology class at the New School I remember we had studied the Doob, Dollard theory of frustration breeds aggression and that type of thing. And I said, that's true. That's actually true of most people, but it wasn't true with my mother. Because she had nothing but frustration in her life, a tremendous amount of... and yet there was no aggression in her. You see, in a sense, a young child can always feel a shift in the parents' emotional energies. And so if there had been any aggression or any of that type of thing I would have felt it. And I thought... because I would have. I knew that in her position if it were me, I would have some.

So anyway I started, so I did about a year of reading Confucianism, Shintoism, Buddhism. And decided to focus on Zen Buddhism because they had so much influence in terms of Japanese culture. In terms of, well, Zen seems to be in, in everything. Their flower arrangement, their dance, just everything. And so I started to, I started to read and I couldn't understand a thing they were saying. Which was very interesting because I said, well, how is it that I can, I know what every word means, and yet I read the whole sentence and I know they're pointing to something, they're trying to say something, but I don't know what they're talking about. [Laughs] So I went to the New York public library every day and just, I wrote notes, I don't know how many pages of notes I had. And I... Dr. Suzuki, Daisetsu Suzuki was studying, was teaching at Columbia University, probably the first and only Zen teacher, teacher of Zen at that time. And very few books were written, had been translated yet. Now, if this had been a decade later, you know, you had in the '50s you started having a lot of people interested in Zen and all. But I had very few and Japanese, I had Japanese books and others. So I had a very difficult time and and then I, another thing I sat in on.

And then one day, I did have, I had an experience in which I think I could understand what they were talking about. But if that was so, then it was an experience you see, of energy. It was like, I think the universe is really, there was a love pervading, it was an energy universe. The New School, it was a school that brings professors in from every university and out of the university, wherever. And I had already had classes with two professors from Union Seminary. My old neighbor was one of them, very good. And he impressed me because he spoke in, in paragraphs so that you had to really, really concentrate. And the other one, what was his last name? He was the one that started the FOR. And I, so I went to Union, and I said, well, I said if you had just said, "God is love," and just leave it there that probably, you know, that might have been true. And I had also had Albert Songman from the Jewish, whatever their seminary is called or whatever. And he had a sociology class. He had been crippled in Germany. So he came, you know, with, arthritic. And he was limping and he was in great pain you could tell. And then he would start lecturing. He would start his talk and then he would, his face would start to glow. And it was just incredible.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2009 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.