“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.”

“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.”

Every year my father had to go sign a lease and he’d go to the landlord's house. And I stayed in the car. He was never invited in to a white man's house. The landlord would bring the paper, and then my father would hold it against the door outside and sign it.

“The coyotes would come down from the mountains. At night you could hear them thundering and howling and so that was a very frightening time because the camp was emptying and that was happening.”

So you know, people were after us. I mean, they didn’t want us around. They made acquisitions and threats and things like that. So I couldn't believe those things were happening. Maybe it was the best thing that they sent us into the camp, to protect us.

“He had seen me entertain pre-war days at the Nisei Week talent show. He heard me singing, and I was 14, and he says he was smitten. He says, ‘I’m going to marry that girl.’

“We had our Christmas tree and my dad said we would take the last family picture before he had to turn in all the cameras, swords and everything into the police station.”

“My dad used to fish. But we didn’t have any equipment so he caught fish with his hands. He would walk along the stream and he would stick his hand in. He found out if you cradled them and gently took them out of the water, they wouldn’t move.”

“All my normal U.S. citizens rights were taken away from me, just for what? Japan went to war with America? We were Americans. That’s what I really resent.”