<Begin Segment 19>

HY: I don't remember the tough parts of life in camp so much except for one episode which I still think about every now and then. That's from when my friend Kazuo and I forgot his last name, but we were same age and we were both camp orderlies. We went to watch a softball game in the daytime. And during, we're standing along third base line. As we're watching the batter, he swung and he missed on his third strike, but he released the bat when he missed his third strike. The bat flew through the air and hit Kazuo in the belly, end on. Of course, Kazuo [grunts], but he didn't pass out or anything, so he seemed to be all right. That night, he got sick. And then when they brought him to the infirmary to check him out, they found out he's anemic, so we said, "Oh, wait a minute, this boy's in serious trouble. He's hurting and he's sick and he's anemic." So they took him to the camp hospital. This kid needs a transfusion. They didn't know what was wrong. He needs a transfusion. So they took several of us volunteer orderlies to see if we can get type across to give him a transfusion. I didn't match him. But he did get a transfusion, but he was taken five miles away to the Fresno Hospital, and there he died. He should have been operated on. Now, I know as a surgeon later on that without any doubt in my mind whatsoever, this boy had a ruptured spleen. That bat hit him right in his belly. It broke his spleen. In those days, the treatment was to remove the spleen, operate. But maybe at Fresno General Hospital, they didn't have surgeons capable of doing that. I don't know. But the thing is he was not operated on. They did transfusion, but that wasn't enough because he bled to death. I'm morally convinced that he died of a ruptured spleen. His life could have been saved. He was a seventeen-year old boy just like me, an orderly just like me, but he died because of circumstances beyond his control. I remember that. Also, I remember that's the first Buddhist funeral I ever went to, and it was held in the barracks, and a Buddhist funeral, traditionally you do oshoko. That's the pinch incense burning. That's the first time I remember that, and I still remember going to Kazuo's funeral in the camp and how he died. That was a bad one.

So there weren't a lot of bad things. I made a lot of friends there. And generally speaking, it depends upon who you talk to, but a lot of camp internees now will tell you how terrible it was, and the food was bad and it was. No privacy; it was dusty, the sanitation was terrible. But by the same, at the same token, it was also, remember these people are people and they're just hugely adaptable, so we survived. We got along. It wasn't all fun, but there was fun times there, great times, you know. Like I remember the camp dances and the, not the variety shows. I didn't even think in those days about the deprivation of my liberty because, of course, that's primary. But, in those days, I didn't even think about it. I kind of figured, well, maybe I deserved it. I didn't know any better. I said, "Oh, maybe it's me because I did something bad." At least I was born on the wrong parents, so maybe I did something bad and so okay, so be it. So I didn't then really think about it. Now I contend to this day that most Nisei my age who says it was terrible, horrible, food was terrible, and so forth, they're telling you basically the truth, but what they aren't telling you is there were good times too. And see one has to be real careful about that because there were people like Lillian Baker who was a nemesis of the Nisei who says, "The Japs had a great time in camp. They were fed. They were paid. They were clothed. They got money," and so on and so on and so on. She neglects to say that we couldn't vote, we couldn't assemble, we couldn't do what we want to do, we couldn't go into town, we couldn't buy this, that or the other thing. She says we had fun, and that's true, but she focuses only on the fun. The other side of the coin is the Nisei will tell you that was all terrible. It was awful, terrible, because that's not true either. Somewhere in between, mainly on the bad side, but there were good times there too. There had to be. We wouldn't have never, even prisoners in camp who serve life prison sentence, they don't say it's all bad. They had some good times. So you have to keep these things in context. If you ever hear a story from a Nisei or from anybody of Japanese ancestry who knows something about the story, if they ever tell you that it is all bad, don't believe them. It's not true.

MR: Who's Lillian Baker? Who is Lillian Baker?

HY: Oh, Lillian Baker was a very interesting character. She was a kind of a quasi-writer. She was a hat pin collector for one thing. She collected hat pins, and she had a column of her own. Then she formed an organization called AH, AHA, Americans for Historical Accuracy. And she said that "these Japs that are trying for redress are lying." They were not interned and technically, she's right because most of us were not, quote, "interned." We were incarcerated, imprisoned, or whatever you want to call it. So she said that these guys are trying to take the government, they were as disloyal now as they were at Pearl Harbor, and so they don't deserve a cent. That was Lillian Baker, she formed this organization who fought the redress campaign tooth and nail. She's dead now, and she donated all her papers to, I think, the Hoover Library at Stanford, but she had many, many documents. The sad part about, to me, Lillian Baker's campaign to discredit the Japanese and Japanese Americans by saying that this camps are perfectly justified, and the Japanese never suffered at all is because there were people of Japanese ancestry who aided Lillian Baker who were in the camp. I says, "Good god, how could they do such a thing." But there were people who aided Lillian Baker and gave testimony to the fact backing up Lillian Baker who were rabidly anti-redress, and I said, man, this woman was a real thorn in our side. As I say, she's dead. But the interesting, another interesting thing is she also had a, I don't know if you'd call it a first lieutenant. She was a shite woman who was, went with her husband to the camp in Amache, Colorado. And this woman says, oh, sure, we were allowed, the camp people were allowed to go into Amache whenever they wanted to, Granada, I'm sorry and do the shopping. They're free to come and go any time they please. What she didn't say, she's a white woman, so she could, but nobody else could do that, so she aided Lillian Baker. For why they did these sort of things, I don't know, but I do know the names of a few of these people that did that. My god, they did this. So, when I get disgusted at people who will help propagate these falsehoods, can you imagine how people who are anti-JACL would get disgusted at JACL when they hear stories about how JACL were sycophants, and they went along with whatever the federal government says; yes, god, yes, master, we'll do whatever you want, very, very complex things. And today, there's considerable animosity towards JACL; although, I think as the Nisei generation dies out, and we're nearly dead now, there probably would be just stories left now. Some of these things are documented. But the wartime evacuation and the Japanese American was such a monumental mistake, and we're still struggling with the aftermath of that because here we're, we're still struggling with the Muslims and Asian, the Middle Eastern Arab Americans in this country, you know. If they're wearing one of these head coverings and all, they're different. Even though that some of the blacks were born and reared in this country and they convert to Muslims, oh man. We have still a lot to learn yet.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.