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LG: So which camp were you in?

AN: Okay. We were ordered to go to the assembly center in Salinas. I mentioned when we were living in horse stalls for three or four months, and then we got put onto a train where they had all the window shades down so we couldn't see where we were going, and we ended up in Parker, Arizona, which is near the Colorado River, yeah, on the edge of the Indian reservation. And the federal government had basically forced the construction of the Poston camp on the edges of the Indian reservation, much to the chagrin of the Indian tribes. They just said, the tribes complained about this incursion because the reservation had been established in 1965 by an act of Congress recognizing indigenous peoples. But anyway, so we were shipped to Parker, Arizona, by train, and then from there, they took us by busloads to camps. And Poston, Arizona, was one of the largest of the camps around, and it was built in three sections, each holding about six thousand internees or incarcerees. And when it was built from scratch, literally, by the government, a few months earlier, it was the second or the third largest municipality in the state of Arizona. [Laughs] All built for incarceration.

There was another one in Gila River which is south of Phoenix by twenty, thirty miles, and I visited that way later on a pilgrimage, so I know where it is. But anyway, in 2018, somebody had organized a pilgrimage to Poston, and so my daughter heard about it and she flew in from, into Phoenix from Chapel Hill, Raleigh, North Carolina, and told me to meet here there. And so we rented a car and drove from Phoenix all the way to Parker and Poston. And so we visited, in my pilgrimage, my daughter could see what it was like. Except that there were only a handful of buildings surviving. Part of my grade school building was still there, because they had been plaster and wood construction, but in the building that my residence was, it was all just crumbled foundations. They had a sign that was in, "This is Block such and such." And so ninety-eight percent of the place was destroyed by weather. Apparently, after camp was over, the local Indian tribes were allowed to use the facilities for some period of time, and I don't know how long. And it had a second purpose or use, but they had since abandoned that. And so what was left behind was just crumbling foundations and things like that. So it was very, there was an effort underway, and to reconstruct a few of the buildings and making them into museums, so that's apparently undergoing.

LG: Was that the first time you went back?

AN: Yeah, that 2018 pilgrimage was the first time in, I don't know, how many decades, I had occasion to go to Arizona, so that was two or three days.

LG: What did it feel like returning?

AN: Well, it's strange. I could not imagine being there as a kid, but nothing looked familiar, and most of the buildings were gone. Except for signs and stuff like that, markers that indicated where the barracks were. There was nothing that, in my head, I could put together, because everything had just changed.

LG: So the journey from the assembly center to Poston sounds pretty scary even as a child, but for an adult, being in a train with blackout curtains. Do you remember that journey? Did you have an expectation of what the destination was going to be like?

AN: No. Also, I want to say that after the war, when we returned back to California, and others had migrated east and whatever, there was a reaction in my parents' generation to not talk about it.

[Interruption]

AN: The prevailing sense or notion related to camp experience was one of rejection, or I don't know what's the best way to put it, but they didn't want to talk about it because it was an embarrassment. It turns out that in 1980, when those hundred Americans were incarcerated by the Iranians, and then they were released after some negotiation, when they were interviewed by the press, a lot of them in some ways talked like my parents' generation from camp, namely maybe we weren't doing things correctly or well, and that's why we ran into this bad luck. And that was some of the thinking and conversation within my parents' generation. The psychologists at that point came up with a phrase that made a lot of sense. It was "posttraumatic distress syndrome," and that described what happened to a lot of people in my parents' generation as a result of camp. And so the other way of discussing it, if there was any discussion at all, was that there was a notion called gaman, which in English, I guess, would be basically gutting it out, sticking it out, surviving. And it was this notion in Japanese culture that people in my parents' generation said, "This is what helped us survive," how to mentally contain it, because we had the ability to exercise gaman. So those were the two outcomes in terms of... and as kids, we hardly learned anything about camp life or anything. I had to reconstruct our family's experience. Much later after I finished Berkeley, I used to come home and visit my parents. My mother had an incredible memory of details, so in essence, I was interviewing her from time to time, and picking up bits and pieces of things that happened, et cetera, to her generation, and to the community at large. As kids growing up in California, the JACL was a core part of the Japanese American community. And so I involved, got involved with various social events, parties and graduation events and things like that, largely sponsored by the JACL chapter, this one in Gilroy, California. So that was helpful. But other than that, I had to dig it out as it were, on an individual basis to help myself get a picture of what was, what happened to the adults in my parents' generation.

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