“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.”
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“Even before WWII, I distrusted the government’s secrecy, propaganda, and censoring that was part of the ‘war news.’ I was especially upset when I realized that letters I received from Aiko and her sister were censored.”
“Army trucks would pull up and someone would shout down, ‘How many in your family?’ And they would throw the toilet paper, and you had to go pick it up. And that lack of human dignity, it just went on and on.”
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“They didn’t break down or anything. Very, very strong people. Actually all the Issei are all like that because when they came over from the old country, they came with nothing. They worked hard all their life for their family. But when you become a parent, you start to see, feel all these things they went through.”
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“When I think about it, I’m mad at Japan for creating this problem. Because the yes-yes, no-no question came up because of the war. It would never have come up before if things were okay. And I’m angry at them because they knew that they had family and relatives living in the United States.”
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“I always wrote to my grandfather, once a week, a small letter in my broken Japanese. And after a year they released my grandfather, and to this day I’m sorry that I wasn’t older to question him about what happened in those camps.”
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