<Begin Segment 6>
LT: Let's move to World War II. And, of course, at this point, when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, you were not alive. This was four months before you were born. What have your parents, have your parents been open about what happened during World War II?
TT: Nothing was said at all that I can remember until I was about college age. And I can't remember, I'd hear nothing, but I remember very clearly one time when I came home, because I'd heard something at college about the internment of the Japanese. So I said to my dad, "You know what I heard?" And so I explained what I heard, and he says, "You know, I've never talked to you guys about this because I didn't want you to have negative feelings towards every American and everybody here because of what happened." He said, "Yes, that happened," and then we started talking about it. Then he brought out the Minidoka Interlude and, I mean, I was shocked. I couldn't believe it. And he started talking about it then, and he did, he had a lot of information. The man kept every piece of paper, I think, he ever had. But he had the copy of the sign that had been posted, and this, and then we started talking --
LT: What sign?
TT: The one about the immigrants have to be in before dark and all this. And then he showed us, gave us information. So, yeah, then he brought us through all of it, but it wasn't until I was in college. And then, by then, of course, Diane and Tom were in high school, so all of us were of an age that we understood. After that there was a lot of talk, and then when redress came he was -- in fact, I've got several of the newspaper articles he wrote regarding redress and stuff like this, and he got very involved in that. Not that he felt the government owed us necessarily the money, but because America is such a monetary system, that's the one way the government would actually put up... apologies are great, but in this society that's so run by money, he really believed in it, that the money part made a difference. Not because how much it was, it didn't matter, but the fact that the American government would open up their pockets and hand that money out. So then after that, it became very, very much an open conversation, and he took his redress money to reprint the Minidoka Interlude. And he passed away prior to it being done, but he had a whole list of what we were supposed to do and who we were supposed to contact. And so we did it, and the Minidoka Interlude was reprinted with his redress money, and it was given to all libraries and colleges in the U.S.
LT: And the Minidoka Interlude was the yearbook at the Minidoka camp where you and your family were incarcerated during World War II. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. What I'd like to do now is to learn about what you know about what happened with your family after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
TT: I know that my dad only had a short time -- my mom and I were in the hospital -- and he had about a week to be able to get rid of everything or pile everything up and be ready to go.
LT: Okay, and what did he have to get rid of?
TT: We had the business, we had a house, we had a panel truck and a car. Luckily a friend of his who had been working with him through that Waddems Company that had supported him, actually came in, and he ran the store during the time, took care of our car and our panel truck and lived in the house. And so we didn't lose out on anything of that type, of that nature. The hardest thing I remember Dad talking about was trying to figure out what to take, because Mom couldn't carry anything other than me. And to get all the stuff together and to be able to get it to camp, I mean, not knowing where you're going to go, what the temperature's going to be like, how long you're going to be gone, that type of thing. But he got all that stuff and a friend of ours came and, I guess, picked us up, picked Dad and Sylvia up, and then came to the hospital, picked us up, and then took us to the assembly center.
LT: Okay.
<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.