What was the role of resistance in the Japanese American community during the internment period?
I’m not a historian, I’m an English teacher and a writer. The day after Pearl Harbor, the FBI and the government swooped in and took our community leaders, mostly people about my age now and older — people who were priests, ministers, Japanese language teachers, sometimes even people who were experts at flower arranging. And, in a sense, whether the government planned it or not, I think they took hostages. So it’s like this: If you take my grandpa and I don’t know where he is, I’m not going to go and resist. You come in and you take my grandma, my grandpa, I’m not going to go around with a sign, marching around city hall, because they’ve got somebody. Right now, we would say “no way.” But if you don’t know where your folks are, then I think you have to think about that. What was it like for your family after the camps? My grandpa, in Fresno, California, had started the first fish store in the whole area in 1912. So he had worked in the fields and got some money together and started a
