“You had a week to get ready to go to camp. You could only take what you could wear and what you could carry with two hands. Everything else gets left behind. The United States government is telling them, ‘You have to denounce Japan and pledge allegiance to the United States. On top of that, we want you to fight for us and go to war.’ If I was my dad, I would’ve done the same thing.”
“I think the main thing is that they had themselves had nothing to do with the problem between the two countries. There’s nothing you can do to promote or diminish it. It’s out of your hands. It’s almost like God’s will. What can we do?”
“I remember my mother and I visited the bathroom building and she had fainted. Nothing like that ever happened before so I thought she had died. That was so traumatic, other ladies went to her aide and others tried to console me.”
“They still could do it, which is that they could make farmland out of nothing. That was the ingenuity and the hard work of Japanese.”
“Judo got kind of a bad name because after the war, there were so many people that got injured. They didn’t know how to fall or anything. So we had to correct all that, and make sure they did the right thing.”
“What bothered me was we lost that whole family unit because the children would sit with their friends. You know, that was really lost. I think that was sad because we were a very close knit family and we all of a sudden lost that.”
“I think that what the Isseis experienced of losing their place in the family unit has been predominant. And if you're any human being, that's a difficult thing to accommodate.”
A lot of people, like I said, didn’t even know we were in a camp. They see my picture and say, “What’s that?” Well, it’s my card from when I was in a concentration camp. “What concentration camp?”
“You know, before we left, we were like little kids. When you go into camp, you got to grow up. You're aware of other things besides yourself. And you're nobody.”