Densho Digital Archive - Homer Yasui Interview II (denshovh-yhomer-02-0020)

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MR: How did the whole experience of internment and incarceration affect the outlook and the mental well-being of the generation, the Nisei generation?

HY: Well, Margaret, from a purely private perspective, my own opinion, nobody else's, I say this: I think that the war, the evacuation experience and the prejudice before, especially during, and to some quite an extent after the war, colored my observations upon how much the people of the United States dislike the Japanese, distrusted the Japanese, and by Japanese, I'm referring to the people of Japanese ancestry in the United States. So to that extent, it is affected the Issei generation, my parents' generation. It affected all of the Nisei generation, my own generation, and to a much lesser extent, the third generation, the Sansei generation, to the point that we're all very, very cautious. I think that not the Issei but the Nisei generation, my generation, are all warped. By warped, I mean that we have been conditioned by being looked upon as second class-type people, less than desirable, not the A group, but the people who are less, little bit less than adequate, so we are insecure. We are warped in thinking that hey, other people don't think that we're as good as they are, so we're always a little bit defensive on this thing. And so feeling that way, we're much, much, much too reactive to things. For what people think and say and do towards us, we will react to that, but we will not come out and be proactive, make a positive contribution in a discussion, for example, and try to lead something because we know that as the Japanese say the malelistic side gets hammered down. So we know that from our experience from before the war and during the war and after the war. If you stick out, you're going to get hammered down. I mean there's an innumerable past example which for me is a truism. So I say that all Japanese Americans, particularly the Nisei generation, have been affected to the extent that they're extremely cautious, overly cautious, overly conservative, because their past experiences colored everything that they're going to do in the future. That's why you don't find too many people who are out there, proactive in advocating things. They will follow along, and they will work in groups, but you'll find very, very few who are going to be out there and being a leader. So to this day, I think that's very true. Now there are my peers who say, "Homer, you're crazy. We're not all that paranoid, and we're not that warped. We're just as normal as anybody else." I says, "No, we're not. We're warped. We are less than the average American mentally." And psychologically, we are much, we are less. And I don't know who diminished us, but we are diminished. That's what I say. Now what can be done about it, I don't think anything can be done about it. I think time will take care of that problem. And of course, there are Sansei now who are coming in. And you know the Sansei, some of them are in their sixties, and they are much more proactive than the Nisei generation. You talk to almost any Nisei, and most of them are not going to get up and wave some flags and, say, make speeches and so on. Most of them won't do that. Quite a few Sansei will now. Some of them will even get obnoxious and aggressive about it. And I expect that, eventually, as the Yonsei, fourth generation, the Gosei, their children get born, because of the intermarriages, they are going to become more vocal or else they're going to submerge. They're going to completely deny their ethnicity or partial ethnicity, be it a quarter or an eighth or one-sixteenth Japanese. That's either going to go that way or else they're going to become more obvious and up front about it. But today, with the Nisei generation, we are still a quiet people. We don't like to have attention drawn to us. We are warped, period.