Densho Digital Archive - Helen Mori Interview (denshovh-mhelen

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RP: You got, you were sharing the story earlier, about how you got involved in the filming of Farewell to Manzanar...

HM: Oh, Farewell to Manzanar.

RP: Go ahead and share that story with us.

HM: Oh, well, we were taking a Japanese vernacular, Hokubei Mainichi up here. It's gone now. They, they quit publishing end of last year? I don't know. Yeah, it was around November of last year. I was so sorry to hear that. Anyways, there was an article in there about they wanted extras for Farewell to Manzanar. So I thought, "Oh, I was in Manzanar, I should sign up for that." So before our trip we, I sent this thing in saying I was available with my four kids were available. And then we went to north, we went to go Tule Lake 'cause Sam was in Tule Lake and then they had a guard tower and three ends of the barracks... migrating farmers are using that for housing. And they're all like pastel colors, light pink, light blue, light green. But the ends of the blocks they made it like barracks, black and white tarpaper over the pine or whatever, you know, just the ends, three, three blocks, yeah, three barracks rather. But then Castle Rock was in the background so Sam says, "Castle Rock's in the background but this is supposed to be Manzanar.

Then we went all the way up to Washington? And then we looped around and came back down. We were on, that's, east of the Cascades going out, came back west of the Cascades coming down and then came back home. And when we got home these was this letter saying they wanted us to be extras in Farewell to Manzanar. So meet at a, in front of this insurance company on Shattuck or whatever that street was. And then we, I did that and it was like eight or nine, eight, about eight in the morning maybe. Then we rode this air conditioned bus, nice bus, all the way to Santa Rita prison. And we went through the prison and the prisoners are like this watching us go by. And we're sort of getting nervous but, you know, they were just watching us. And then they had this, Santa Rita had an old building that had a stage. And that's probably why they picked that place. But the scene that I'll... oh, and then another thing that was funny was I dyed my hair the night before 'cause I thought I was, I was gonna be an extra, you know. And the one, the role they picked me for was a mother that lost a son during the war as a soldier. And I says, "Don't you think I'm too young for that?" And this guy says, "Oh, my auntie was really young when my cousin died in the war." And, so anyway, I was in this, we practiced different scenes but the actual thing was on the cutting room floor because the scene I was in I was next to Nobu McCarthy and you see these five or six ladies on the stage and then the next shot is a closeup of Nobu McCarthy and she's crying and she's getting the, accepting the American flag. So, I was on... and then Emi, our youngest daughter, was in a scene. She was learning ballet, she was putting her legs up and down. That ended up on the cutting room floor too. So that was our experience. Oh, and we signed up, we donated our, we got fifteen dollars a day, that day. And it was donated to Kimochi, Kimochi in San Francisco.

RP: And what is Kimochi?

HM: Kimochi Inc, is, they take care of senior citizens programs and stuff like that, feed them, hot lunches, things like that. And the food was good. John Korti was the director. He came by and talked to us. And so they fed us lunch and dinner. It was very good food. I got back about -- it was pitch black -- so it was about nine, nine-thirty, to Berkeley, yeah.

RP: The kids had really gotten involved in the, in the story.

HM: Yeah. Yeah.

RP: They were part of it.

HM: 'Course at that time we didn't know we were gonna be on the cutting room floor so... but it was a good experience. I thought it was a good experience for the kids too. Just to see what goes on behind the scenes, you know, what they do and that kind of thing. So, it was interesting.

RP: How about the redress movement in the 1980s, were you...

HM: We were not active at all. We signed some things that we were at such and such a camp and we thought redress was a good idea and that kind of thing. But we weren't actively involved.