<Begin Segment 13>

LT: Before we come back to Beaverton, let's talk a little bit more about your camp experience. Because you spent several years living with your family in one room, and you spent your days with other Japanese Americans. How was that a change for you and your family?

GT: Let's see. Will you state that again?

LT: Yes. Living in camp, at Minidoka, with Japanese Americans, whereas you had gone to school with Caucasian classmates, your neighbors were typically Caucasian, the customers at your store were Caucasian. This was a change for you living and working with Japanese Americans.

GT: You know, somehow we did stick together, even after the... yeah, our friends, they did stay together though, even though they weren't maybe in the service or army, but they stayed together. Of course, I should take that back, too, because I'm not sure. But we did stick with a lot of our own Japanese friends, but then on the other hand, we'll say that when they were released, these Japanese people that were in camp, they went to all corners of the United States. They had no other place to go, maybe they had a friend over there, or relatives in the state of, you could say New York, a lot of people went to New York. Wherever their relatives or friends were, it seemed like that was the one way the Japanese population did get spread out all over the United States, so people could understand and get to know the Japanese. And I think that was one of the good things. It broke up the families of Japanese, that's right. Back in Portland, they all live right close, like little ghettos. All the restaurants were, they had restaurants and they had hotels, but they're all right together. So all the relatives would live close together. But when the war broke out and they're all released, most of 'em didn't have no place to go back to, so they picked some place in the United States, and that's where they moved. And they just... all parts of the United States. And that way the other Caucasians could get to know the Japanese people. So I think in that way, it was a good thing.

LT: There were positive consequences from the war. What would you say would be the most difficult consequences from being in camp?

GT: Let's see now, how am I going to answer that? I think I've got to ask you one more time. What did you say?

LT: You've talked about the positives from being camp. What would you say would be the biggest difficulties?

GT: Oh, when we were out on our own? Yes, we did meet a lot of resistance here and there because of Japanese, the war just ended, there was a lot of animosity there. And some, they were real nice about it, but there was a lot of animosity. They didn't come around and tell you, but you could kind of feel it. Especially I know that one time when I was coming back from the service, I was with a couple of my boys, a couple of graduates from Hillsboro High School, they were in the service, we were traveling someplace together. And we go into a restaurant, but right out in the front there it says, "No Japs Allowed." And they resented that, so they said, "Well, let's get the heck out of here, let's go find someplace else." We can always look for someplace that didn't have that sign. But you did run into a lot of that. Or if you got onto a bus, I myself had a driver tell me, "To the back, please," or something like that. And if you don't go right back, they just got a little bit, they just practically forced you back there. Said, "Get to the back of the bus, you Japs." That's about what they meant. I've seen that a few times, that you were not equal, "You can't be sitting up here with the white people, you go in the back with the other people." So in those ways, we could feel that kind of a feeling. Of course, it was just right after the war, there was a lot of animosity. There was a lot of people that were killed by the Japanese or the war over there, so there was a lot of hard feelings yet.

LT: When you face someone who challenges you to go to the back, or tells you that you can't become a patron of a store or a restaurant, what does it do to you? Is there ever a point where you think you want to say...

GT: You feel like it, but I never did. I just, I guess I didn't want to cause any problems. So I'd listen to them. You didn't like it, you didn't like it at all, but at that time, even the war was over, you just wanted to say something, you don't do it. Something like, you have some of those heroes now that we have are the ones that are, like, was it Rosa Parks? She was the one that didn't like that, and she spoke her piece. You wonder now, at that time, maybe that's what I should have done. But you didn't know whether you were going to get hit over the head or get beat up or what. But that was a kind of a feeling right after the service. And it didn't go right together easy because there was a lot of that hard feeling still left out there. And some of those you can't blame because they were maybe prisoner of war, or they ran into some Japanese and fought the Japanese or got killed by them or something. But there was a lot of that feeling left yet. It took a long time for it to ever, like right now, I think that's all gone, at that time, it was a pretty tough feeling.

LT: Were there those who stepped forward to support you in ways that you didn't expect?

GT: No, I didn't ever see that, except when those, I was with those GIs, those kids I went to high school with, they kind of spoke up their piece, but that was the only time that they were supporting us.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.