<Begin Segment 5>

JA: Were, let's, see, you came in '43?

MS: '43.

JA: '43.

MS: I came right after the riot.

JA: Right. What did you know about that, or hear about it?

MS: Actually, I didn't know a thing about it. It hadn't been in our papers, they hadn't written it up much that I know of. And when got there, what surprised me was every move we made was followed. At night, if we wanted to go to the latrine, there would be a soldier outside the end of the barrack, and I guess he would signal or something to the fellow in the, in the tower, and they would shine the spotlight on us and shine, follow us all the way to where we were going, wait for us, and then take us back to our building.

JA: Even the staff and teachers?

MS: Yeah. Well, I heard a lot of stories about that time when people were hiding under billets or one thing or another.

JA: Really? Were you there when the "loyalty questions" came out?

MS: Yes.

JA: Tell me about that.

MS: Well, the teachers, they closed the schools at that time, and they sent out this questionnaire of thirty-two questions. And 28 was the "loyalty question," well, 28 and 29, actually. And when we went through it the first time, they would answer one way. And then it was decided that the question was wrong, because if they answered it "yes," then they were denying their religion if they, you know, when they were denying the emperor. So these people were all called back, and then we answered, we went through the whole thing now with a different question. [Interruption] When we started to ask this question the second time around, there's a young, this man came in to answer the questions, he was in line, and he says, "I know how I'm gonna answer it." And he held up this jacket where he had been shot with pea gravel from one of the soldiers during the riot. So we had people like that, and we had some people that asked for repatriation. And when I taught school in Japan, I ran into one of 'em, this young man I was going with at the time, we'd rented a boat to fish on the Sea of Japan. So the two of us and a, we had twelve people to wait on us to row the boat, take the boat out and so forth. And one of them came up to me and he said, "I know you," in English. I said, "You do?" He said, "Yes." He said, "You were at Manzanar." I said, "Well, yes." He says, "I was, too, I lived in the bachelor block," which was right next door to where I was when I was living in Block 7. And I said, "Well, why are you here?" He said, "Well, I asked to be repatriated." I said, "Well, are you glad?" He said no, it's the sorriest thing he ever did. So he was really regretful that he had done that.

JA: Alisa's just reminding me that the "loyalty oath," the "loyalty" questions were 27 and 28.

MS: Yeah, there were two questions.

JA: Yeah. Give me those numbers again, what they were.

MS: I can't remember 27. Twenty-eight, to me, was the outstanding one, and that was the loyalty. Then, you know, "would you go to war?"

JA: "Would you go to war for your country?"

MS: Yeah. And they had this, they came up with different answers to this. It depended on how the sentence was worded, and I can't remember how they worded, it's so long ago. But then they did it again. They figured, "Well, this question wasn't worded right the second time," so they came up with another question on these. And they brought all these people back again and had them go through this group of questions. Like I said, there were thirty-two. And they answered different ways, and some of 'em answered 'yes' or 'no,' 'yes' or 'yes-yes-no' or different, all the different ways you could. So later on they had hearings on it. Then my sister came to the camp, and she was taking flying lessons across the street where they had a little group of small planes where they were giving lessons to the people that wanted to go to, the women that wanted to go up to Sweetwater in Texas and learn to fly bombers. [Laughs] And that's what my sister was doing. So during the day, when they had the court hearings on everybody that answered it several different ways, she took down their, the depositions that they made then, and they didn't care when she typed it up. So she'd take her lessons in the afternoon and then type it up in the evening.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.