<Begin Segment 8>

DF: Can we go back to a little bit about your childhood?

AT: Sure.

DF: So growing up in Hawaii and moving to Sand Island, what, do you remember what your parents had told you why you were moving?

AT: No, we just moved. You just moved when they told you to move. And Mom was told, she was given notice that she was to get rid of everything and put it in her suitcase, a little bag, and move to, it wasn't Sand Island. It was a little area outside of Sand Island. My dad was in Sand Island, but the families moved to another little area where they kept us for, oh, until we could get the families together, they could get the families together and move us to the mainland. They just weren't set up to keep us in any area for very long.

DF: And why was your dad taken?

AT: My father was a Japanese schoolteacher. He was a principal for the school. They felt that he was a threat to them, to the United States. He had some influence, they felt he had some influence over the community. And anyone with any kind of influence, school teachers, newspaper publishers, priests, ministers, anyone of any influence was taken. They couldn't take us all because there were so many Japanese people were living in Hawaii at the time, so they took only the ones with some influence.

DF: Do you remember how many people were there?

AT: I wish I could remember. I know I have an article that tells me exactly how many, but I can't remember how many.

DF: Did you have friends there that were with you at the time?

AT: No, none. My father knew the publisher of the newspaper from Maui, and he had a lot of friends, but no. There was no one that I knew who went to camp with us because there were so few of us who went to camp.

DF: What effect did living in so many places have on your childhood?

AT: Well, I don't know that, because I'm such a poor correspondent, I've lost track of so many wonderful friends that I've made along the way. You can't keep friendships long. You don't accumulate anything because as soon as you move, you throw everything away again. My education suffered I'm sure because we moved from when they first started the camps. They didn't have schools set up right away for the children. That came as they could accumulate things. I've never regretted it because I remember so little of it. I didn't seem to suffer because of it because I was too young to suffer through it. My mother and father may have. But even to this day, my father has always said our life has been blessed because all this happened to us, and he could, and we could do a great deal, and we lived in Japan for a long time in a great deal of comfort. He's never regretted any of the things that just happened to us.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2004 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.