Although you probably know a fair amount of the plot already. Your own allegiance is based in part on your experiences and inspired by them. I should say my book is, too. I read your bike your autobiography as the start of my research. Byhaps you like to start setting a bit of the Historical Context for the audience. The detention of japaneseamericans is not covered in our schools as well as it should be, it is not a subject that is as wellknown as it should be, because there is so much to learn from it. Perhaps you can start by telling us about the historical background before we go on to your own personal experiences. George i know the power of stereotypes. There is a long history of the stereotype depiction of asians and asianamericans in the media in the United States. The set the backdrop for bombing of pearl harbor to trigger this hysteria. We happened to look like the people that bombed pearl harbor. By of the stereotype images the media fed into that hysteria. There was also racial prejudice, because from the beginning, when immigrants started coming from asia, they were denied naturalized american citizenship. Immigrants from anywhere in the world that ultimately look forward to becoming naturalized americans, except immigrants from asia. There was that racial discriminatory background as well. Denial was used to deny land rights to asian immigrants. From from asia, denied the right to buy land, but there was no language that to that effect in the law. All that said was aliens ineligible to citizenship were denied Land Ownership in california. That was first passed in california, and then later by oregon and washington state. Subterfuge had to be used by asian immigrants. My grandfather was a wily guy. He developed land that was wasteland, into a productive farm in the Sacramento Delta area. He wanted to own it. He could not, because of that alien land law. So, he bought it in the name of his firstborn son, my uncle, because he was a native born american. And his worked for his young son on the land that he owned. When the war started, there were ambitious politicians who used that existing racial prejudice and combined with war hysteria. In california, we had an attorney general who knew the law and the constitution. He was also an ambitious politician and wanted to be elected governor of california. He saw that the single most popular political issue in california was to get rid of the was the get rid of the japs issue. This attorney general who knew the constitution became an outspoken advocate, a leader in the get rid of the japs movement. He made an amazing statement. He said there have been no sabotage orpying or activities by japaneseamericans and that is ominous. [laughter] because the japanese are inscrutable. You do not know what they are thinking, so we better lock them up before they do anything. , thehis attorney general absence of evidence was the evidence. That kind of Political Leadership fed into the existing prejudice and war hysteria that swept up the presidency as well. We were incarcerated. That attorney general won the election for governor, and he was reelected and reelected again. He became a very popular governor of california, then he was appointed to become the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. ,ou may have guessed who he is his name is earl warren. The great liberal Supreme Court chief justice. All of that background led to the incarceration of innocent citizens, who happened to be of japanese ancestry. Host it is an interesting question how things like this happened, and you said there are several factors that come together. Racism, a background of there are some people out there you can identify as bad actors and opportunists, trying to get their own economic advantages. Then, i think you have to assign responsibility to the mass of the American People who are not willing to stand up and say this is wrong. Episodes like this happen when you have some small concentration of bad actors, but then widespread indifference. I hope that is maybe something we can learn from the past and a lesson we can take forward for the future. In this climate of fear, with some peoples booking some people stoking the fires of president of racial roosevelt president authorized western command to exclude some people as he deemed necessary from the west coast. Like the land law, this did not on its face say anything about japanese ancestry, but everybody knew that is what that what is about. Japaneseamericans to leave the west coast. Gore was no place they could and in some places, the owners said you cannot leave until you are ordered, and when you are ordered, you can only go to one of these camps. Could you tell us about your personal experience in that program . George i was incarcerated from age five to eight and a half. War. Uration of the the tension and anxiety on the part of my parents. I just celebrated my fifth birthday and a few weeks after mymy parents got younger brother a year younger and our baby sister, not a year earlynd we got up very one morning and we were told to wait in the living room. Bedroome packing in the and we were gazing out the front window, and we saw two soldiers with bayonets on their rifles marching up our driveway, and banging on the door. I remember how scary that bank was bang was. Our father answered it and we were ordered out of our home. My father gave us little packages to carry and my brother and i stood out on the driveway, waiting for my mother to come out. Which he finally emerged, she had our baby sister in one arm, and a huge double back in the in thend duffel bag other and tears were streaming down her face. The terror of that morning is still embedded in my memory. That was the beginning of it. To the race track with other families that were gathered. We were herded over to the stable area. We were each assigned a horse stall to live in. For my parents, it was degrading, humiliating, and wishing to go from a twobedroom home to a narrow, smelly horse stall. Another memory i have is a fiveyear old kid, i thought it was fun to sleep where the horse sleeps. My real memories are quite quiteent and unrepresentative of the real experience that my parents had. My father told us we were going on a long vacation, and it was that for me. It was a fun experience to ride on the train for the first time. We were taken to the swamps of arkansas, but the first winter it snowed and i remember how magical that morning was, to wake up and see everything covered in white. I remember we had snow fights with my father. Then he showed us that a snowball to be rolled in may to a great day snowball and we built a snow fort. Those are the memories i cherish. I also have the memory of starting school in a black tar barrack. We had the school day every morning with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. I could see the barb wire fence of the Century Tower right outside my schoolhouse window as i recited with liberty and justice for all. Host that is very touching, how the closeness of your family and that intimate circle to transform what was a terrible injustice into an experience that was actually pleasant in some ways. I suppose many of the children did not really understand what was going on. Of course, your parents did. Do you know how that made them feel about the country . Your brother your mother was a birthright american citizen. Sacramento. Born in actually a farm area near sacramento that got absorbed into the city. For my parents, it was the most anguishing period of their lives. As a teenager, i became very curious about my childhood incarceration, which i experienced with the innocence of a child. I wanted to know more about it, because i read civics books, i was 15 by this time. I was also inspired by dr. Martin luther king, and his ideals. I was active in the civil rights movement. I could not really quite thatstand how and why incarceration happened. I had many long discussions with my father after dinner, and i must say he was a very unusual japaneseamerican of his generation, because so many japaneseamericans who experienced the internment as adults and felt the pain did not want to inflict that pain and their anguish on to their children, so they did not talk about it. Talked to many i younger japaneseamericans who saw our musical allegiance and came backstage and told me that they knew their mom and dad or grandma and grandpa were in camps, but that is all they knew because they did not share it and they learned about their and why theirry parents did not want to talk about it. Particularly, the loyalty questionnaire, they do nothing about it. To give you some background on the loyalty questionnaire, right after the bombing of pearl harbor, young japaneseamericans like all young americans, rushed to their Recruitment Centers to volunteer to serve in the military. This act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. They were denied military asvice, and categorized enemy aliens. American citizens were called enemy aliens and if some protested, that was revised to enemy not aliens. They could not put down enemy citizen. They took the word citizen away from us, and we became nonaliens. A year into the imprisonment, the government had a wartime manpower shortage and he were all these young people they could have had, that they denied military service. How to get them. They came down with the loyalty questionnaire to establish whether they would be loyal and serve in the military. Andmost outrageous question that loyalty questionnaire was, one sentence, twice question 28 which asked to conflicting ideas. Will use where your loyalty to the United States of america and forswear your loyalty to the emperor of japan . We are americans. We had no loyalty to the emperor. We had never even thought of loyalty to the emperor. For the government to assume that there is a racial loyalty to the emperor when we are americans, americanborn, american educated, it was outrageous. No, no, i do not have a loyalty to forswear, the no also apply to the first part of the same sentence, will you swear loyalty to the United States. If you answered yes, you do swear loyalty to the United States, and you were confessing that you had been loyal to the emperor and now were ready to forswear and set aside that loyalty to the emperor and repledge loyalty to the United States. It was an outrageous question. That became one of the two most controversial questions. My father was anguished by that, me, asshared that with well as a lot of other parts of the internment that we discussed after dinner. Me our explained to american democracy. He said is it it is a peoples democracy, and it can be as great as the people make as but it is as sellable human beings are salad bowl ible as human beings are. Andold me the story of war warren. Our democracy depends on people who cherish the highest he the stevenstown to for president headquarters and said we volunteer, but actually he volunteered me, but there i was working together with other passionate people, dedicated to man,ng this great stevenson who was the personification of the best of american democracy, elected. That is what got me to be politically active, as well as active in the social justice movement. The loyalty questionnaire is one of the pointed moments in allegiance, and it did have this paradoxical, contradictory nature. In almost the same way that the evidence of sabotage being claimed as evidence of intent to make some conservative concerted move is also paradoxical. Another sort of paradox in our title, allegiance. In part, it is about loyalty to the country, and yet the whole program and what you are describing is in it is an example of the country betraying its people. The japaneseamericans perpetrated by the u. S. Government and this great injustice was done to them. In fact, the Supreme Court was not willing to say it at the time, but people agree it was a constitutional violation. A hard question is, how to respond to that. Allegiance does a good job of dramatizing this choice. Within the japaneseamerican community, there were different responses. Some people wanted to do everything they could to prove their loyalty, by complying with the program, by volunteering for the armed forces, by answering the call for the draft. People who said what is truly patriotic is to resist this violation of the constitution and defend american ideals by challenging it. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about that choice and the way it comes up in allegiance. Those that bit the bitterand swallowed the and went to fight for this were put on another age, and all separated separated, all japanese unit that was put on Dangerous Missions and have the highest casualty rate of any unit, but they also fought with amazing heroism andliteral they did come back as heroes and the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War and that timed lasts until present in American Military history. They are heroes, and they fought with amazing, unbelievable courage and patriotism. , thoseder the resistors you described as standing on principles and resisting the draft within the prison camp, and their position was a very american position, they pay a high price as well. They did hard time in federal pension that centuries for standing for american principles, and i consider them just as heroic. We worked in a love story where the sister of the young man who rose to fight for this country falls in love with a resistor, and she works with the resistor, marries him and they built a family, but when the young man comes home, thats with the is a symbolicat split of the family to symbolize the fracture in the japaneseamerican community, which we discovered still exist today exists today. People that were on opposite sides, and because of that, paid a heavy price, particularly the resistors families. There were many tragedies in those families. Suicides were committed because of the vilification that they got from the veterans that jcl d, and from the jacl, an organization that plays a part in our drama, a Real Organization that plays that exists today. I joined about organization because they changed after the war, fighting for many rights and improvement of the condition of japaneseamericans. They vilified the family of the resistors, and there were some suicides committed by those that an mentee today. Exists heroes,re two kinds of but both heroes made incredible sacrifices, and that was the price of winning our democracy. I think it is one of the greatest tragedies that the two sides on this conflict had such areiculty seeing that they both forms of patriotism and ways of expressing loyalty to america and american ideals. Going back to the loyalty question there loyalty questionnaire, it was responsible for your Family Moving from one camp to another. About the lake . Answered no to defend the United States of america by bearing arms. My mother had three Young Children and to ask her to bear arms, leaving her children in a andon camp was outrageous it had to be responded to by everyone over the age of 17 at the camp. This had been asked of young men as well as 87yearold immigrant ladies. , with no real thought given to it. Preposterous, with no real thought given to it. Because of that, we were transferred to to the lake. It is much harder than the camp we were first incarcerated in in arkansas. I have wonderful memories of the camp there. , it snowed, verdant in the wintertime and it was sultry in the summertime sweltery in the summertime, but tulu lake was a contrast to that. It was a dry lake bed by the california border. Andand was hard, gritty, sharp sand. Apparently, there were snails in that lake there. It had been dry for a long time. Weedswere lots of humble tumbleweeds. Many people there, particularly young men, were radicalized by the goading by the loyalty questionnaire and the treatment that they received. Activists. Into they became they called themselves the volunteer corps. They were going to rise up when japan landed on american soil and be physically ready for them. Jogsdid calisthenics and and they jogged in the morning around the block. Headband and some sunted the military rising anded on their headbands they jogged around the block. That is the sound i woke up to tulu lake. Gs in they would end their jobs with banzai. Then they would scatter. The mps would try to identify who they were but they surreptitiously changed their place regularly so they could not be captured. They would stage Midnight Raids on some of the units in the barracks and young men would be dragged out and taken. Jail,ad the concrete which was constructed by the internees there at tulu lake. Not,often than the the the wrong people were dragged out. My father was a block manager so he had to explain to the Camp Administration that they got the wrong people and sometimes he was not successful so he would organize people to go discuss with the Camp Administration, the group of people to back them up. One of them was a demonstration and my father took me to that and i do have memories of going with my father to one of those gatherings near the Administration Building and the gates suddenly opened and i inembered jeeps came roaring and the mps were standing with their rifles aimed at us and we all scattered. My father grabbed my hand and we eric barrack. Lakeemories i have of tulu are not the kind of memories i have from arkansas. Pilgrimage or a we had gone back three times and we went through the stockade , the jail. We saw graffiti written on the walls there and we also saw brown stains here and there. Apparently, some men were brutalized and their heads were smashed against the concrete to a bloody stain which turned brown over the decades. I thought the description of tulu lake in your autobiography was one of the most compelling parts of it. Inis an action you convey allegiance. Me asle of things struck so amazing about the lake. One was the way in which things just keep getting repeated over and over again. The jail within a jail. Also, the government keeps trying to figure out who the bad guys are, keeps on getting it wrong. Tuluugh, in this case, in lake, there actually was a projapanese element. The other thing it demonstrated to me was you can take a population that is intensely you can mistreat them and ca