Susan Kitazawa | Interview 2 | January 24, 2022

TEWES: This is a second interview with Susan Kitazawa for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes on January 24, 2022. Ms. Kitazawa joins me from San Francisco, California, and I am in Walnut Creek, California. So thank you, Susan, for joining for a second session.

KITAZAWA: Thank you for having me.

TEWES: As we left off last time, we were speaking about your life and work and experiences in the Japanese American community. But I wanted to start off this time thinking specifically about your family's experience with incarceration. I thought we'd break this up perhaps into the two sides of your family. So first could you tell me a little bit more about your paternal family's experiences during World War II?

KITAZAWA: Yes, I would be happy 00:01:00to. My father's parents were working their very, very small family flower nursery in San José at the time that people were taken for incarceration. It was a tiny nursery, just the two of them worked at it. And when my father had been at home, he worked with them. And at one point, they had a helper man who worked there, but that's it. It was their work. It wasn't like a big fancy business. And so they were taken from there to Manzanar, as were my mother and father. And my father told us that for his father, I mean, even though he wasn't happy about being taken away from his home and his nursery, that he was able to sell, on paper sell the family nursery and business to people at the Quaker Meeting House in San José, where he 00:02:00was a weekend custodian. So they bought the place on paper for a dollar and they held it for them until they came back home again, which was really fortunate that they had that connection to people in the white community. Didn't lose their land or have to sell it super cheap, because they only had like less than a week to sell things when people were taken.

So anyway, they went to Manzanar. And it's amazing. My father talked about his father -- he was very proud and happy, my grandfather, because according to my father, he was put in charge of the victory garden, the vegetable garden that grew a lot of the produce that was used in the kitchen and the dining hall there. And so he had a role that was, from his point of view, important, and it was also related to his normal life work, which was in small agriculture. 00:03:00Then my father said that his mother was actually fairly happy being incarcerated. I mean, she didn't like being incarcerated, but she was fairly happy being in the setting where they were, even though it was very primitive and rough, because working seven days a week, long, long hours keeping the nursery going was a lot of really hard physical labor. So she didn't have to do as much physical labor when she was incarcerated, and also because she was immersed in Japanese community, lots and lots of Japanese speaking people. My grandfather was reasonably bilingual in English, because of needing to have business transactions with his nursery, but my grandmother really had very limited English. So for her to all of a sudden be with a whole lot of Japanese-speaking people, my father said she felt that was all right. So that was 00:04:00their day-to-day life.

And then my father worked on the -- should I talk about the Guayule Project now or does that come later?

TEWES: Well, maybe we'll wait just a second here. I'm interested, because I don't think a lot of people from San José went to Manzanar. Do you know why the family went there?

KITAZAWA: Yes. It was because my mother and my father, separately from each other -- they didn't live together or know each other or anything -- they were both assigned to Manzanar, because there was a project called the Guayule Project. G-u-a-y-u-l-e, I think. It's a kind of cactus, Guayule is the Spanish name for the cactus. And there was an effort to synthesize rubber from the sap from the Guayule Project, and they actually succeeded in doing it. So there were science people who I think were connected to UC 00:05:00Berkeley, where my parents were both graduate students. So that's how my parents, individually, separately from each other, got assigned to Manzanar. And then because they were assigned there, the government sent both my mother's parents and my father's parents to the same camp, I guess in maybe some effort not to split up families. One likes to think it was for that.

TEWES: Okay. I was like, that's so unusual.

KITAZAWA: Yeah.

TEWES: And did your father have any siblings?

KITAZAWA: He had a brother and a sister, but when he was nine years old, his four-year-old sister and his six-month-old brother both died within one week. My father said they both contracted tuberculosis and passed away. The story is the hired worker who worked at the nursery with the 00:06:00family had TB and that the kids got it from him. So this was all like family legend. Who knows what exactly happened? But they both had a respiratory illness, a severe respiratory illness, and they died within, I think, three or four days of each other when they were little, when my father was nine years old.

TEWES: Oh my goodness.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. So he was not only the oldest son, the oldest child, but he was also the only surviving child, which put a huge amount of pressure on him just to be the perfect kid and be there for his parents and do everything right. He never spoke about it until he was much, much, much older. One day he just suddenly started talking about his brother and sister. I knew as a child that his brother and sister had died when they were young, but I didn't know any details. It 00:07:00was like Manzanar. You just weren't supposed to talk with him about it.

TEWES: Yeah. Did they have extended family who were able to come to Manzanar with him?

KITAZAWA: I'm not exactly sure where my grandmother's sister and my grandfather's brother went. I think they went someplace else. I should know this, but I don't know. My father's parents just had the three kids and the two died in childhood, so they just had him. so they were the really small family. And then the aunt and uncle, which was my grandmother's sister and my grandfather's brother, were married and they had a slew of kids. And not sure where everybody went.

TEWES: Okay. And I'm curious about, before removal, what your 00:08:00father's family was doing. He was at Berkeley in grad school. They were in San José with the nursery. Did they talk about the time after Pearl Harbor at all and what those moments were like?

KITAZAWA: I don't remember anybody talking about that. I think the main thing I remember about after Pearl Harbor was them going out onto the street from wherever they were inside. I mean, the signs were, I think, only in English. But I remember my parents talking about going on the street and seeing those signs, which many people have seen, the executive order signs like tacked up on windows and telephone poles. They were out there in public just saying, "If you're of Japanese ancestry, on this date at this time you need to show up at such and such a place." 00:09:00And the whole thing of being shipped off to camp, it was very sudden. It was just like you get up in the morning to go to class, and all of a sudden, you find out that if you're even partly of Japanese ancestry you need to show up at this place. I think it was like a depot or a train station or some kind of a transportation thing. And so you knew you were going to go someplace. And I don't know how they heard about the rules, that you could only take two pieces of luggage and whatever you took with you, you had to be able to carry yourself. Just the suddenness of it, I think that was the main thing that they talked about, was just the sudden, unexpected mess of, okay, your life has just been torn apart and you need to pack up what you can carry and show up at this place, the assembly center, for whatever was going to happen to you next, and not knowing what was going to 00:10:00happen to you.

TEWES: Yeah. You do a good job speaking about the suddenness here. Do you know which assembly center they were sent to?

KITAZAWA: They went to Tanforan, like by the Tanforan Shopping Center, which I believe was the racetrack. And they were there. And so then I think from Tanforan, they got sent to I think it's Santa Anita in Southern California, which was also a racetrack. They slept in the stables there. They were recently used for horses, so it was like straw and manure and that kind of thing. And they slept there. I don't know how long they were 00:11:00there. And then from there, they got up on the train to go to Manzanar, I believe. They didn't talk about it a whole lot earlier on, but to the extent that they talked about it, it was just the whole thing of having to show up at an assembly center, which you didn't know exactly what was going to happen, and then I think they got bused to Tanforan and there was the racetrack or horse stalls or something there, and then being sent probably by bus to Santa Anita with more racetrack, horse stall reality, and then from there to Manzanar. And through all of this, you don't know what's going on. Are you like the Jews in Germany? They're sending you off to be gassed. Or are they going to keep you 00:12:00for a while in the horse stalls and let you go? Just having absolutely no idea what was going to happen to you. I think that was the biggest, biggest impression that they left us with as kids, was just the utter uncertainty of it. And so not only is your life completely disrupted, but you're put in this situation where you don't know where you're going to be in a week or you don't know if you're going to be alive in a week. You just don't know and nobody's telling you what's going on. And just lots of soldiers, US military people with guns and very clearly you had to do what they were telling you, because they had guns. And it didn't make any sense. It's just like, Oh my goodness, how could this be happening? And I think especially for someone who's a US born 00:13:00citizen, who supposedly has rights, you realize that your rights don't matter and that you are in this situation over which you have no control and about which you have almost no information.

TEWES: Thank you for that. We'll speak about your parents a little bit separately. But I am curious about your paternal grandparents. They chose to return to the San José area after incarceration?

KITAZAWA: Yes. Yes, yes. They went back to their nursery, they went back to their land. And they bought it back from the Quaker Meeting House people who had held it them, so they didn't lose their land. Many, many other people lost whatever real estate they had, land or housing or whatever, if they owned it, because of the 00:14:00extremely short notice on which you had to leave. And so people were trying to sell their furniture and their homes and everything. And so obviously if people know that you're going to be shipped off in a few days, they can bid really low for whatever you're trying to sell. You're between a rock and a hard place and you have to sell it for whatever you can get. But my grandparents were very fortunate in that way, that they had the Quaker Meeting House connection, because my grandfather was the cleaning man on the weekend.

TEWES: Yes, thank you.

KITAZAWA: That wasn't their church. They went to Wesley United Methodist Church, which was a traditionally Japanese immigrant church. They were Methodists, but he was the cleaning man at the Quaker Meeting 00:15:00 House.

TEWES: I'd also like to speak about your maternal family's experiences during this time. You spoke a little bit about the grandparents who lived at a boys' school, but I'll let you pick up from here.

KITAZAWA: Okay. [Their names were Shigeji and Kaoru Makino.] My mother's father worked as the live on-site cook at a private boarding school for wealthy boys. Obviously wealthy white boys. That was in Los Gatos. And he worked seven days a week. And he and my grandmother and their three children, my mom and two younger siblings, lived in what was described to me as a cinderblock -- they called it a cinderblock house, but it sounds like it was more like a shack. I think it was tiny, tiny and it was behind the dining hall where my grandfather 00:16:00worked. Well, he had cooked in the past for rich people in different capacities, so he had experience as a cook. But I think he chose that job partly because it was at a boarding school, and since my grandmother was ill with schizophrenia and not really very functional, by having a job at a boarding school, part of the deal was that his kids got to attend school at the boarding school, which was kind of an amazing fringe benefit. I mean, he was paid very little. They're living in kind of a cinderblock shack. He's working seven days a week, split shifts. Lots of working people know split shifts, like you get up at 4:00 and you work the breakfast and feed breakfast and clean up from breakfast and then you have two hours off and then you work again, do the same thing for 00:17:00lunch, and then you have two hours off and then you work again to do dinner and then you're done at 7:00 at night and you go to bed and go back to work at 4:00 in the morning. So you don't really do anything except work. That was his life.

So Grandma just stayed in the back of the dining hall in the cinderblock shack place. I guess she could go out of the building, kind of wander around, that way he could kind of keep an eye on her. And then the kids were busy during the day at school, because they were allowed to go to class with the wealthy kids. For my uncle, because he was a boy, that worked out pretty well for him. He had lots of male playmates and he got to be close with the headmaster's son and other key people. And then my mom and my aunt, they were the two girl students at an all-male school, so I think that was kind of weird for 00:18:00them. Because it was a private residential school for rich kids, my mom said that often in class it would be like a one-to-four ratio. Like there would be a teacher and four students or a teacher and six students. Not like a regular school. And the teachers, according to my mom, were very, very good. My aunt and my mom and my uncle all talked about how they got this very, very, very good education compared to somebody who would be going to a regular public school.

And then later, I know my mom went to the public high school. I remember that. I don't know much about it, but I know that she went on the bus or something to the public high school in Los Gatos. And I'm not sure about my aunt. And then later my mom, when she was 00:19:00fourteen, was sent to live at the YWCA in San Francisco, which was a Japanese American at the Y at the time, the one in J-town. And she finished her last two years of high school there and then she went to Berkeley at sixteen. My mom was really, really, really smart.

TEWES: Yes.

KITAZAWA: My aunt stayed at the boarding school through high school, I believe. And then my uncle, their brother, when it was time for people to be incarcerated -- yeah, he was much younger than them, so he was still at the school. My mom was off at Berkeley in grad school when incarceration came. My aunt had just gotten accepted at UCSF [University of California, San Francisco] Nursing School, and she was really excited about going there. But she never 00:20:00got to go there, because then she was incarcerated before her program began.

And then my uncle, who was the youngest one, he was still at home. And so when it was time for people to be incarcerated, the headmaster and the powers-that-be at the school, because they had connections, they worked it out for him to go to be at a dude ranch, which I think was in Colorado. It was somewhere in the mountains. And it was a dude ranch where rich people went to go on trail rides. They would stay in the facilities up there and pretend they were cowboys for a week for vacation. And so my [uncle] was passed off as a Native American to the school, and he led trail rides and things and took care of the horses and whatnot. I think he was the only one of my 00:21:00relatives who was living in the United States at that time who wasn't incarcerated. And then, of course, my relatives in Japan weren't. But I think Uncle Ernie was the only one that was not incarcerated. And he loved horses. He later became a veterinarian. So for him this was kind of super wonderful, other than the fact that I think he was still a teenager and was separated from his family. But sometimes when you're a teenage boy being separated from your family, a lot of teenage boys would think that was all right. And he got to ride horses at an okay place to stay. And he lived with the other people who were doing the same work. I think they had a bunkhouse or something. So anyway, that was his experience. And years and years later, after my mom had already passed away and my uncle was toward the end of his life and he got together with his 00:22:00younger sister, my aunt -- and she told me later he was crying and said he just was so, so sorry he had abandoned the family, and that he had always felt guilt that they were all locked up while he was riding around on horses in the mountains, and that he had always carried this huge shame and guilt that he hadn't been there for the family. My aunt was amazed that he had felt that way and that he had carried that feeling with him through all those years. I mean, they were in their eighties when this was happening, when he was apologizing and crying.

TEWES: Do you know how the rest of the family felt about that?

KITAZAWA: He was the baby, because he was the younger brother, and he was a good bit younger than the two sisters. And so they were just really grateful that their baby brother, their kid brother -- he wasn't a baby, he was in high school, I think -- 00:23:00but that he had been saved from that experience.

TEWES: I also think it's interesting that one of your sisters ended up working for the Indian Health Service, I think. So there's this long connection there.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. My Uncle Ernie, the one that lived with the horses, he became a veterinarian. Of the three of us kids, I became a registered nurse, my sister became a medical doctor for the Native American Health Service, and I always worked with mostly immigrant people and Black Americans as a nurse. My sister was a public school teacher. We all grew up to very much feel that our job was to serve the community, and particularly people who are living in marginal lives. And I think that 00:24:00that was partly just because of my parents' values, even before they were incarcerated, and perhaps made stronger by the fact that they had been through that very unjust experience. And so it was all in our bones to make sure that people who weren't getting an even chance in life got some support and help and that we put our energies there.

TEWES: Yeah. So your mother's brother went to Colorado. What about her parents and her sister?

KITAZAWA: I think he was in Colorado, I'm not sure. It was someplace in the mountains and they called it a dude ranch. Her sister went to Arkansas, to the center there. I don't know why she was sent there but she was sent there. And so she was completely separated from the 00:25:00family. I know she carried some resentment about that, that the parents and my mom were together, and Uncle Ernie got to go ride horses, and she was off in Arkansas with no family. I think partly because of her isolation, she married another Japanese American person while she was incarcerated there, which was a marriage that did not last long and did not go well. She was still married to him when they were released, but I think part of it was just she didn't really have any family support system or anything. I don't know a lot about her experience, other than that she talked about being bitter that she was shipped off to a different place and cut off from family.

And then my mother's mother and my mother's father were in Manzanar. 00:26:00I never really heard much about what either of them did. I heard absolutely zero from them about what they thought of the experience, partly because I did not meet my mother's mother until I was twenty-six. And my mother's father came to visit us several times a year when he was on break. He wasn't working at Manzanar anymore. He got a similar job, seven days a week as a cook in another rich boys boarding school in Upstate New York when we lived in New York State and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts. So he lived closer. So he would take the Greyhound bus and come visit us when he was on winter break and spring break and sometimes Thanksgiving. And other than that, he was always working. But when he came to see us, I don't remember him ever speaking about incarceration 00:27:00or really anything. I don't remember that grandfather speaking about anything at all, zero, about his life history, other than: he was born in Japan; he came to the US and he worked as a cook for rich families; and loved to gamble and loved to ride roller coasters and blew whatever money he was making; and then went back to Japan and ended up in an arranged marriage to my grandmother, who had already been married once and had a son, which none of us knew about except for my grandfather, until maybe the last year of his life. 00:28:00He didn't talk about camp, about relocation at all. He didn't talk about Japan at all. The only thing he talked about was when he came to the US by himself and worked for rich families as a cook. He had some money. So he gambled a lot. And he loved to drink and he was a very, very functional alcoholic, I think. Somebody who never drank that affected his work, but when he wasn't at work, he was drinking whiskey. And he loved roller coasters and that's kind of all I know about him. A gambling, drinking man who loved roller coasters, and who got married to this woman who apparently had been married before and had a son. And when her husband in Japan died, the husband's parents took the son, because he was their male heir and sent her back to her parents, and then they remarried her off to my grandfather.

So anyway, he came to the 00:29:00US. As soon as he found housing, my grandmother was supposed to follow him and come here and live with him in California. But after he came here, they found out my grandmother was already pregnant with my mother, and the rule back then was you couldn't go on a ship if you were pregnant or if you were under two years old, you know, across the Pacific [on a] ship. And so she had to stay in Japan until my mom was two, and then they came to the United States and joined him. I think already by then he was working as a cook, yeah. And then my grandmother was schizophrenic, and back then I don't think anybody had the word schizophrenic or knew. They just knew she was weird and talked to herself and kind of wandered around talking to herself all the time.

And she was very well educated. She was from a silk merchant family in Japan. She was from a very educated, higher-class background, but she ended up living in this shed behind the dining hall in America and hallucinating. And should I say this? Yes, because people need to talk about mental illness and how it wasn't taken care of back in those days. When the kids weren't in school -- I forget if my mom or my aunt told me this -- she used to lock the kids in the closet, because she couldn't deal with them and they would just be in the closet, sometimes all day, while my grandfather was working. It's a very traumatic, terrible thing, but it's the truth that people should know about. In the 00:31:00past, mental illness was just seen as you're just a bad person. Why don't you get your act together? So her mental illness very much affected my mom and my aunt and my uncle, who thankfully, had the school staff to kind of keep it together for them. And then that was still happening when she went to incarceration. And then when they were released, the US government officials said, "She's too mentally ill. She can't go with you. She has to go to a mental hospital." And so she went to Modesto State Mental Hospital and was there for twenty-five years and went through all those treatments that have now been completely debunked as sort of torture for mentally ill people, but people believed they worked. They wrapped you in a sheet like a mummy and put you on the ground and dumped freezing cold water over you. That was called 00:32:00water treatment, I think. And then also she had a lot of electroshock therapy to her brain while she was in there. Again, just the primitiveness and the sadness of life for people who have mental illness.

One good thing that Ronald Reagan did when he was the Governor of California -- good for my grandmother -- was when he closed a lot of the state mental hospitals and dumped all the mentally ill people out onto the streets, who are now among the homeless people that we see, people who are not able to take care of themselves on their own, my grandmother got sent to a board and care home, where she lived out the rest of her life with a very, very, very nice lady, who had about four or five people in her house. She and her husband ran the board and care. 00:33:00And my grandmother was very happy there. She was still hallucinating, but she wasn't harming herself or anyone else and she lived out the rest of her life there. So when I was twenty-six I went out there to meet her, and that was the first time I met her. It was pretty special. My parents said, "Don't go see her, because she's mentally ill. She won't even know who you are. She'll just get upset, she'll just yell." But she recognized and acknowledged my mother as her child when my mom went to see her after she was there. She recognized me. She said to me in Japanese, which I actually understood, "Oh, you're Fumi's daughter." And I said, "Yes, I'm Fumi's daughter." Fumiko was my mom. Unfortunately, when my aunt and uncle went to see her there as adults, she said, "No, no, no. You're not my children. My children are still 00:34:00little. My children are still someplace else." And it was very hurtful for them to not be acknowledged by their own mother. But she was mentally ill. So anyway, I would go out to Modesto to see her at the board and care home and I would usually visit her for about maybe fifteen minutes before she would start telling me in a very agitated way, mostly in Japanese and partly in English, that I had to take my kids and leave, leave, leave, because the police will come and they'll take your kids, which seemed very psychotic to me. But I would just take my kids and go home. And at the very end of my grandfather's life, probably the last three months of his life, he told me how she had had a son in Japan and that the son had been taken by the husband's parents after the husband died. She had lost that 00:35:00son and been married to him and gone to the United States. So it was true. She had a child that was taken away from her, and so that was not just her schizophrenia. That was something that really happened to her, that you can have a child and they can take your child away from you.

TEWES: Yeah. It sounds like she had a lot of traumatic experiences in her life connected --

KITAZAWA: Yeah. And my mother never knew about this. And I called my mom and I said, "How come you never told me you have a half-brother?" And she said, "What are you talking about, Susan?" And I told her what my grandfather, what her father had told me. And when my mom was eight and the other kids were younger, the three of them went with their parents back to Japan for one year, because the doctors had this idea that maybe she would get better if she got to go back to Japan for a 00:36:00while. And my mother, when she was eight, had gone on this trip with her parents and her siblings to Japan. And when I said, "No, Grandpa told me, like, Grandma had a son before with her first marriage in Japan. The father died, they took the brother back, the baby back." And my mother said, "Oh, that's who that boy was." So then it was my turn. Like, "What boy? What are you talking about?" And she said, "When we went to Japan, we went to visit an elderly couple, and there was a boy there who was about a year-and-a-half older than me. And my mother was instantly close to him and spent more time and attention on him than with us three kids while we were in Japan. And I never really understood, like, why is my mother so attached to this boy that we just met?" And she said, "That must have been my 00:37:00 half-brother."

TEWES: Oh my goodness.

KITAZAWA: So that's another Japanese thing. If there's tough things, don't talk about it, keep it sacred. I think that's very much part of the culture. So just like there wasn't a lot of talk about Manzanar, there was no talk about what had happened to my grandmother and her son and her first husband. I mean, nobody knew. Only my grandfather knew. I think I was the first person he told, and it was within months before he passed away.

TEWES: Wow.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. When he was, like, around his late eighties. I was at his apartment once and he just told me this whole story all of a sudden.

TEWES: Whew, okay. Thank you for sharing that one. I think you're right. That's important to tell, that certainly it was a tough 00:38:00family story to hear, too.

KITAZAWA: It also turns out that my father's aunt, right, his mom's sister -- I told you his two brothers got married to two sisters in Japan. The sister, my great aunt, she also had children in Japan that something happened. I don't know what happened, but she was left behind and she was married off and came to the US with her second husband. And that part of the family only later found out that there were these ghost children in Japan, unspoken of. So I have a feeling these stories are not unique. I have a feeling that there's a lot of other people, especially women, who lost their kids somehow and got married 00:39:00off by arranged marriage to somebody else and they didn't have any say.

TEWES: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that. I did want to touch back on your parents. Did they meet while on the Guayule Project?

KITAZAWA: There are different versions of reality. My mother says, yes, that they definitely met when they were fellow researchers on the Guayule Project and that they met there in Manzanar for the first time. And my father, when my mother would talk about this -- like this was a story I think I heard many, many times as a kid. Like anytime anybody would ask how they met, my father would say they met on the Guayule Project. And my mother would say, somewhat indignantly -- no, she would say they met on the Guayule Project, and he would always say, somewhat indignantly, 00:40:00"No. No, Fumi. We met at Berkeley. We met at that party at I-House," which is short for International House, "at Berkeley." And we talked for a long time, like maybe an hour. And he had this very clear memory and he would say things like, "Yeah, you were working as a live-in babysitter for this family, and you told me that and you were majoring in the sciences, too." He would go on and on about this wonderful meeting with her at UC Berkeley at a party. And she would go, "No, no, George. I don't remember you at all. You must have been talking to somebody else." And he said, "No, no. Because when I first saw you at Manzanar, I was like, Oh my God. There's that wonderful lady that I met at Berkeley at the party." He was apparently already smitten with her by the time they met in Manzanar. But my mom says, "I don't 00:41:00 remember."

TEWES: What do you think about that?

KITAZAWA: It was just kind of a joke in the family, of just, "Yeah, okay, Papa. I guess you didn't really make a big impression on mom." And he says, "Oh yeah, I thought she was beautiful and smart." And my mom goes, "I don't remember that at all, George." That was a funny story in the family. And they would kind of mock argue about it, even though we'd heard this story a whole lot of times. They would kind of go back and forth, like, "No, I met you." And "No, no. I don't remember it at all." So there's a little question about where my parents met.

TEWES: [both laugh] Got it. Do you know if the project was onsite in Manzanar or was it offsite?

KITAZAWA: Yes, it was onsite. And it conveniently was in the middle of the desert, where there was a lot of Guayule cactus 00:42:00growing. I don't know if it was a cactus. It was like some kind of succulent plant. I think -- and I might be 100 percent wrong -- I think it's kind of like aloe, shaped like that. Just like aloe has that really soupy sap to it that people use for lotion and stuff, I think the Guayule had some kind of real juicy fluid in it that they did -- they eventually succeeded in synthesizing rubber by the end of the project. But it was late, [too late to be used in the war effort]. The war was pretty much over, so they didn't need to make synthetic rubber. Because they were having rubber shortages like for the wheels for the airplanes and stuff like that, so that's why they wanted to make synthetic rubber.

TEWES: Right.

KITAZAWA: It was the government's idea.

TEWES: Do you have a sense of what your parents felt about that, working towards the war effort while also being 00:43:00 incarcerated?

KITAZAWA: They were both very deeply science people, so just to be able -- it's like my grandfather, who had a nursery, being able to be in charge of the victory garden. It was like, Oh, I get to use my best skills even though I'm locked up. And my parents were very much science research-type people. And so for them to be able to continue that within incarceration, they felt very, very fortunate that they got to do that. And also, my father was a US-born citizen, he was American. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and attacked the US -- Hawaii wasn't part of the US then -- but attacked US forces. So they 00:44:00were very much on the side of America, that we needed to win the war against the Japanese imperialist military government and win the war against Hitler. My parents were very deeply Americans. And the one thing where my father drew the line is when people signed up to be in the military to fight. He was like, "No. No way am I going to join the Army while my family's incarcerated." And he was kind of down on the people who did that, although later he came to really, profoundly respect the 442nd and everything. But at the time he was incarcerated, he was like, "There's no way I'm going to go fight for the US government while my family is still locked up." But while they were locked 00:45:00up, I think they felt good about -- that they were doing something constructive for the war effort. Like you're not going to go out and kill other people for the war effort, but they would do the research.

Or like another job in Manzanar was making camouflage nets. So weaving strips of brown and green cloth into netting to make camouflage tarps to put over tanks and things. And so a lot of people were making camouflage nets. And I think a lot of people felt okay about helping the war effort, but they weren't about to go out there and get shot at and kill other people, to that extent to help the war effort when their families were locked up. Although a lot of people did go into the service.

TEWES: Right. And the last time we mentioned 00:46:00that when they were released your parents went to Upstate New York for your father's education. Do you have a sense of why they chose Upstate New York and not to return to California?

KITAZAWA: Well, they didn't have a choice. And again, everything I say, it's like what I've been told, because I wasn't there then.

TEWES: That's fine.

KITAZAWA: My father and mother both said that they were told they could be released on the condition that they leave the State of California. And so like old people like my grandparents could go back home, but the young people that I think the government still saw as a threat, like you still might do something bad or something. I don't know. It's kind of like after 9/11. If you're an old person, okay, you're Muslim, but we'll let you hang around, but we don't want these young hotheads 00:47:00around. Like the younger people, my understanding was, were strongly encouraged or required to leave the state, to get out of the area. And I think also they were trying to deconcentrate the number of Japanese Americans in the area, I think. I don't really know. All I know is that going out of state was pretty much something that they felt they had to do. I think if it was totally up to them, they would have gone back to Berkeley. Because they liked being at UC Berkeley. But that wasn't really an option for them. And so I don't know how they did it, but I think people got sponsors in other places. They would sponsor them in jobs or sponsor them to get into some academic program. And I know there was this man, Dr. Forsythe, who was somehow instrumental in my 00:48:00father's being in that PhD program in Syracuse, New York. And so they went there and I met Dr. Forsythe when I was maybe twelve or fourteen or something, because my parents kept in touch with him and his wife, because they had been supportive of them and helpful right after they got out. So I think it was just like he probably wrote letters and found: where is there a good program that would match what I want to do? And then Dr. Forsythe, I think, was like the sponsor. Kind of like someone who's going to be responsible for you. That's your connection in the community. And so if my father started doing something bad, then Dr. Forsythe's taking responsibility for him, if that makes any sense.

TEWES: Yeah, 00:49:00yeah. Now, you mentioned that your parents really started talking about some of this later in life. And I'm wondering how, beyond talking to your family, you learned about the history of incarceration. Was that through school or some other research?

KITAZAWA: Okay. Well, definitely not through school. You have to remember, I'm going to school right in the 1950s and 60s, before the US civil rights legislation passed, when it was still legal to have whites-only covenants on towns for deeds, and it was perfectly all right to say, "I'm not going to hire you, because you're Black." It was completely legal to be totally discriminatory. So certainly, they weren't going to talk about how the US government locked up US citizens in the 00:50:00desert. So that wasn't part of my schooling at all. Most of the people I was around didn't even know what happened.

How I first learned about all of this was I knew my parents had met while they were incarcerated, and I knew they were incarcerated because they were Japanese American. And I knew that even if you were a citizen, you could be incarcerated. And I don't even remember when I learned this, but I think I was very, very young, like five or six years old. And that it was a bad experience and that it was in California, and we're in New York, so we don't have to think about that. It was pretty darn clear that it just wasn't something we talked about. Just like I knew very early that my father's brother and sister had died when they were little, and that my mother's mother was schizophrenic. But those were just all things that we just don't talk about, because they're bad things, so we just don't 00:51:00talk about it. But there was a book called -- if I can remember the number right -- Citizen 13660, I think.

TEWES: Yes.

KITAZAWA: 13660. And it was written by a woman artist, Miné Okubo. Okubo was incarcerated. She was also in Manzanar. And even though you weren't supposed to keep records of what was going on, like you weren't allowed to take photos or anything, except for Dorothea Lange, who the US government interestingly commissioned to do all these pictures about incarceration -- I don't exactly know why but she did. But anyway, so Miné Okubo was someone who liked art. I think she was in her twenties when she was incarcerated. And so she began making all these black and white ink 00:52:00drawings of daily life in Manzanar. And then there's this book, Citizen 13660, and each page is about three-quarters filled up with one of her drawings, and then at the bottom there's just maybe three or four sentences about what's in that picture. And it's a chronological history of the time that they got gathered up in the assembly centers and shipped off in the trains and when they got to the center and their life there. And I don't remember if it goes up to when they were released. But this book was in our home ever since I can remember. And so if we asked anything about incarceration and that time in their life, we were told, "Well, just look at the book. You can see in the book." I think it's kind of like how people who are very uncomfortable with 00:53:00sexuality, when their kids ask questions about sex, they just get handed a book. "Here, read this book, but don't talk to me." And it was very similar to that. Just, "Okay, you can know about this. Just look at the book but don't ask me about it." Before we could read, we would just pore over the pictures in the book. And then later, when we could read, we read the book. And so I just grew up with that book in our house. Through all the different moves that we made, we just had that book. And so that's how I knew about the barracks and the latrines and the dining hall, and the sand blowing all the time into your food and your bed and your teeth, and the guard towers and the soldiers and the guns. I learned all that from that book.

TEWES: It's so funny to me that they kept that in the house.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. I know one 00:54:00time when I was somewhere in elementary school in Pennsylvania, I forget what year, but I don't know, for some reason we had to talk about our families or how our parents met or something like that, and so I said my parents met when they were locked up in the prison camp. And the teacher got really mad at me and said, "You're supposed to tell the truth. Don't make things up." And I said, "No, that really happened. And my parents told me that." And the teacher said, "Your parents lied. Nothing like that ever happened in the United States." And she got really angry at me. And I felt really bad, because she thought not only that I was lying, but that my parents were lying to me. And so my mother said I could take the book to school and show her the book. And I showed her the book and she just brushed it off like, "Yeah, whatever. That was stupid. Things like that don't happen in America." And 00:55:00so from that experience, I learned to just kind of shut up about it. I just didn't talk with people much about it.

And then I remember, okay, when I was maybe in eleventh or twelfth grade, I was very active in Girl Scouts. There are two centers that the Girl Scouts have. One of them is in Switzerland, it's called Our Chalet, and the other one is called Our Cabaña and it's in Mexico. And these are international Girl Scout centers. And if you're really a super good Girl Scout and have been really active and contributed, you can apply. I think they had scholarships to go, like, for a week on this international experience where you would meet Girl Scouts from all over the world. And I was really excited about going. You write essays and then you get chosen for an interview. And I remember I was in the 00:56:00finalists. I was down to the last few girls who were being considered to go to Switzerland to Our Chalet. And they asked me all these questions and I think even though I was really shy then I did a good job of answering. And then the last question was, "We know you're Japanese American and we're wondering if anyone in your family had anything to do with the Japanese Americans being in what they called relocation camps." And I said, "Yes, my parents and my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, everybody who's a little bit older than me was in there." It was a panel of three older white women. And one of them said, "So if you go to Switzerland, to Our Chalet, and anybody asks you about this, what would you say?" And I said that I would tell them that, "It was a mistake that the American 00:57:00government and American people made. And it was based on war hysteria, that people thought anybody who even looked like the Japanese enemy was the enemy, even if you were born in the US and you were a citizen, like my father, by birth, and that they thought that somehow the Japanese Americans were going to aid Japan in the war effort. And that that was a mistake, and that they just built up this whole hysteria about it and convinced other people that people like my parents had to be locked up." And then the interview situation turned to ice and they said, "So you would criticize your country?" And I said, "Well, it's not happening now, but they made a really bad mistake then." And then they just said, "This interview's over." And so 00:58:00I obviously did not get to go to Switzerland.

TEWES: What did you learn from that experience?

KITAZAWA: Pardon?

TEWES: What did you learn from that experience?

KITAZAWA: I learned that if you're interviewing for something that you really want, that you shouldn't talk about this, even if they ask about it. I should've just said, "I don't know. My parents didn't talk about it," although I don't think that I really believed that. I mean, I knew people were already pretty racist about things, so I didn't really learn that. But I was just shocked that it came up in the interview. I mean, they brought it up; I didn't bring it up. And I guess I didn't really learn my lesson that time. Like there was the time that my teacher said my parents and I were lying when I was probably in about third grade. Got shot down then. Got shot down at the Girl Scout 00:59:00 interview.

And then once when I was in my thirties, I was on my first round of interviews to get a job as a registered nurse, because I was close to graduation. And I went to a job interview, and also the white female interviewer at the end of the interview, just regular interview questions, she said, "What's something that you really care about, that you like?" So I answered. And then she said, "What's something that you don't like that makes you angry?" And I said, "I don't like it when people treat other people in a racist manner." And she started yelling at me and said, "I'm not racist. I'm not being racist toward you." And I said, "I wasn't talking about you. You just asked me 'what is something I don't like.'" And I said, "That's something I don't like, when people are racist toward each other. Like 01:00:00how people treat Black people. I don't like that." And she goes, "Well, I'm not a racist and this interview's over." So that was probably the most recent time, which was a long time ago, that I just got totally shot down for bringing up injustice or racism in an interview kind of situation. But I'm retired now, so I don't have to go to job interviews, and I will. I will speak up about like what's truth. This is what's truth, this is what happened. Sometimes that makes other people really uncomfortable, but that's their problem.

TEWES: That's a good observation.

KITAZAWA: And I think a lot of times people who have had marginalized experiences, like 01:01:00incarceration or mental illness, either as a relative or as themselves or as being treated badly, because they're gay or lesbian or in some other kind of minority group, that people do get shot down and people get bashed verbally and I think that it does have an effect. It can have an effect on us and silencing us, and just not speaking of our experiences or at least choosing carefully who we tell of our experiences. And I think that's one thing that's starting to change since George Floyd was murdered, was it's really becoming more of a movement. That, hey, not everyone in this country has had the same experience, and just because you haven't had that experience, doesn't mean we haven't had 01:02:00that experience. And don't discount our experience. Don't tell us not to talk about it. Don't silence us, either directly or indirectly, because we're going to talk about our truth. And that's partly why I agreed to do these interviews, is because I think that it's really important that what are called under-told stories are told. And I think it helps all the people, whatever their untold or under-told story is, to feel more empowered to speak their truth, to speak of what happened to them and to name it and to describe it and not to just be directly or indirectly encouraged to just keep it to themselves, get over it. "That was a long time ago. You're just being oversensitive."

TEWES: Yeah. I appreciate you --

KITAZAWA: 01:03:00"You're talking about something that happened hundreds of years ago, just forget about it." It's like, no, we're not going to forget about it.

TEWES: I appreciate you drawing that through line. Something you mentioned earlier was language, and the language people were using to describe these experiences. And I've been saying "incarceration" throughout. What did you grow up calling these experiences?

KITAZAWA: We grew up calling it "camp." My parents met and married at camp. Sounds like Girl Scout summer camp. You live in tents and go swimming in the lake and eat hotdogs over the bonfire. It was always camp. And I think a large portion of the Japanese American community of the age of people who actually went call it 01:04:00camp. All my older relatives call it camp. I don't know, I hardly ever heard anybody call it anything except camp who was actually in it. And then it kind of shifted to being "internment," internment camp. "When we were in the internment camp," blah, blah, blah. And then my father was one of the people who started using the word incarceration and would say -- actually, no. I take that back. He didn't say incarceration; he said "concentration camp." And there were quite a few people starting to say concentration camp. And then there was some pushback from some people within the Jewish community, that, "What you guys went through was not the Holocaust concentration camps, that you're elevating it to a degree of terribleness. You're equating it to 01:05:00our people's experience and it's not really that." And so even though the word concentration from a language point of view just means you've taken a group of people and concentrated them in one area, that I understand the people in the Jewish community who feel that we're taking over a word that doesn't belong to us. And so calling it incarceration or incarceration centers gets around that conflict there. And since then, I myself, personally, I will talk about my parents, my relatives were -- I will usually, if I can remember, use the term incarceration centers. My parents, my people were in incarceration centers. And if I'm talking about what the 01:06:00Nazis were doing in Jewish -- I will usually call them extermination centers. They weren't just concentrating people there, they were actively intent on exterminating all the Jews. And so that's how I differentiate it, is the Jewish people were sent to extermination centers where the focus was on exterminating their people and our people were incarcerated, they weren't just at camp. But as my mother said after they were there for a while, "We realized that probably they weren't going to kill us." At first both of my parents said they were afraid that maybe they were going to be killed. But then after they were there for a while and could start their own schools and Boy Scout troops and garden and everything, that, "Okay, they're just going to keep us locked 01:07:00up who knows how long, but they don't intend to kill us."

TEWES: Thank you for sharing that.

KITAZAWA: Unless you get too close to the fence. And then even if you're not trying to escape, you get too close to the fence and you're dead. As the young man who walked too close to the fence at Manzanar was shot to death by one of the people in the guard tower. I mean --

TEWES: Yeah. How did you hear about that?

KITAZAWA: How did I know about that?

TEWES: Yeah. Did your parents tell you or did you have to research that?

KITAZAWA: That might have been in Miné Okubo's book. I don't remember. I just know I knew as a kid that one guy was shot to death, because he walked too close to the fence and that he wasn't, from what I understood, wasn't trying to escape. He just made the mistake of getting too close to the fence. He was just looking out over the fence when they killed him. And then my parents at some point did talk 01:08:00about when that young man was shot. There was rioting. I don't know if it was rioting, but protests, and there was a lot of uproar at Manzanar. And my father was very negative about those people, too, that they were putting everybody's lives at risk by causing this disturbance. And I think probably his own self sense was that, "They'll just kill all of us if we don't behave ourselves." That's like all I know about that, and I don't exactly know how I know about it, but I knew when I was young that one person got killed for walking too close to the fence. A guy, a young guy.

TEWES: Thank 01:09:00 you.

KITAZAWA: I think I share this in common with a lot of Black Americans, which a lot of my Black American friends have been surprised to hear. But when my father taught me how to drive when I was sixteen, he taught me that if you -- I don't know if I already talked about this. If you see the police red lights in back of you, pull over the first place that's safe, park the car.

TEWES: Yeah, you mentioned that.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, and just put your hands on top of the steering wheel and freeze. The message there was, "Because if you don't, they might kill you." And I think that that was a subtext of how my father saw the world, of just, "You better behave yourself, because otherwise they might kill you." And another thing I remember him telling me is, "If someone has a gun, don't ever make the person nervous or 01:10:00afraid or they might hurt you, because they're scared. Like keep your hands where they can see you. Don't move quickly. If anybody, law enforcement or otherwise, if anybody has a gun or a lethal weapon, your job is to not scare them or upset them or make them feel threatened."

TEWES: Wow.

KITAZAWA: I don't think white suburban kids get that lesson.

TEWES: No, I suspect most do not. No. I also want to talk about memorialization of those who have been incarcerated, and particularly pilgrimages. I know you've been to one at Manzanar. Can you tell me when that was and how that came about?

KITAZAWA: I don't remember what year it was. 01:11:00I just can't help you at all with that one. My sisters and I had -- especially my middle sister, the one two years younger than I -- we had been kind of urging, I shall say, urging Papa that they have these pilgrimages in California. Because we both lived in California at that time. Trying to encourage him that maybe it would be good to go on the pilgrimage to Manzanar. And he was just completely, utterly dead set against it. It was like telling him he should go to Belarus or Mars. There was just no way was he going to go to Manzanar. And then I don't know what turned him around exactly. I think part of it was that his very good friends, Irwin and Sara Fischbein, a Jewish couple who had helped him get his first real science research job after he got out of his 01:12:00PhD program. He had really, really, really crummy jobs, and then Irwin helped him get his first real research scientist job. So they were long-time buddies. They knew my parents before we were born. So Irwin and Sara said they were really interested, and they would meet him there at Manzanar if he would go with me. They're Jewish so they have the whole Holocaust history, not themselves but their families. So I don't know. Somehow this got set up.

So I met our father in LA, and we drove up to Manzanar and Irwin and Sara drove up and we met them there. And we drove up separately. And then when we got there, we parked the car outside the fence and my father got out of the car and he was looking over the barbed wire fence into the area where 01:13:00the internment camp was, and he looked really confused. And my father was not at this time the tiniest bit demented or Alzheimer's or anything, his brain was totally sharp until the day he died. And he was standing there looking really confused and he said, "Sue, where are all the people? What happened to the barracks that the people live in? Where is everybody?" Oh, before he said that, when he just said, "Where are all the people?" I thought he meant the tour group that was going to go through the site. And I said, "Oh, Papa, they're probably over by the main entrance. They're probably gathering there." And then that was when he said, "No, but where are all the people, the ones that live in the barracks? Where are the barracks?" And that was when I realized he was expecting to get out and see like the scene he had left when he was in his 01:14:00twenties, like, still going on. And I said, "Papa, it's like you and mom, like, everybody left a long time ago. Like, they tore the barracks down. Nobody lives here anymore." And then he was embarrassed and he kind of goes, "Oh, oh, oh. Yeah, right. Of course, of course." And then he said, "Oh, you're right. The people are probably over by the gate. Let's walk over and join them." But there was that moment of him being utterly confused. And I realized in that moment how traumatized he was, that in his mind, it was still real, it was still happening. And for him to go back and visit there was just going back to the scene of a terrible, terrible thing, and he just didn't want to have anything to do with it.

So anyway, we went over to the people by the gate, we joined the tour. There was a young man with a microphone and a loudspeaker 01:15:00box and there were maybe half-a-dozen younger people who were in charge of the tour, and then a lot of the people who were on the tour were people who'd been incarcerated as younger children. Because a lot of the people my father's age had already passed, right. So we were walking around and the guide would say, "Here was such and such." And then my father would say, "Actually, I think the dining hall was a little bit farther that way." And then he would say something else, like there was such and such here. And my father would say, "No, actually, that was da, da, da." And so after he did that a few times, the young man leading the tour, he goes, "You lived this, sir. Why don't you lead the tour, because you know what it was?" And so my father somewhat hesitantly took the mic and he led the rest of the tour. And it was just this incredibly healing experience for 01:16:00him. It was amazing. And his friends, Irwin and Sara, were there, and they were able to talk with him. It was just wonderful for him. I was just so grateful that the Manzanar Pilgrimages exist, because for my father, it was this incredibly healing experience.

It was before they were starting to try to make it into a national historic site or park or whatever it is now. And he actually started writing letters to the Department of the Interior and stuff to support that effort to make it recognized as a historical site. And also after that trip was when the local elementary school heard about this guy who'd been incarcerated and they invited him to come to speak to elementary school classrooms, and he went and talked to some of the older elementary school kids about his experience. It was just an incredible, wonderful experience for 01:17:00him that just opened things up for him.

And then later, going to the newly opened exhibit on incarceration that was at the Smithsonian Institute. The first night that that section was open, you could only go if you had been incarcerated and my father went with his buddy, Mike, who was one of his ham radio friends, and they went. And my father walked through, and he said it was really quiet, and all you could hear was a lot of people crying quietly. And he said, "As I walked through, I became more and more enraged. Like, how could they do this to these people? This is so unjust, this is so wrong, this is just absolutely stupid." And he said, "I just found myself being enraged and 01:18:00furious. That how could the government, how could [it] do this to these people?" And then he said all of a sudden he thought, "Oh, I was one of the people." And he said, "It just hit me like, Oh, this was done to me and mom and my parents." And he said, "I realized to deal with the pain -- " he didn't use this language, but basically he just said he had disassociated himself from the experience, because it was just so painful and hadn't owned his own experience or owned his own feelings about it. And he later told me that instead of the rage he felt that evening walking through the exhibit or that afternoon, he said, "I always felt ashamed." He said, "I was like an ex-convict. I had been incarcerated. I was an 01:19:00ex-convict. I was ashamed. And partly why I didn't talk about it was because I didn't want you kids to think of me as an ex-convict." Which just blew my mind. And he said, "Yeah, I always felt shame, like somehow I had done something wrong." And I said, "Yeah, you did something really wrong, Papa. You were born into a Japanese American body. That was your crime." And he goes, "Yeah. Like I just never got it before, that that's how I had it programmed into my brain, that I did something wrong."

TEWES: Wow.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. And even though he was very much, "We are Americans. We should be proud of ourselves, we should be proud of our heritage -- " he talked all that even when we were kids. But deep inside of him he was carrying this huge shame that he wasn't a real American and that he wasn't a real person deserving of what other 01:20:00people deserve, and that somehow, he had done something wrong and that he deserved this experience. So that all kind of blew my mind, just listening to him. Wow, that's really heavy.

TEWES: Susan, let me ask you: when you were at Manzanar on this pilgrimage, what was it like for you being in that space after having heard about it and read about it for years? What did that bring up for you?

KITAZAWA: Hard for me to say. I think I was just so focused on my father and just getting him through the experience. I liked being there with a bunch of Japanese American people who were paying attention to this and advocating for it being remembered and everything. And 01:21:00then this is kind of weird. My mom, whenever my father would occasionally talk bitterly about incarceration, my mom's reply was -- and I heard this many times -- "But the mountains were so beautiful," because it's right next to the mountains and a lot of the year there's snow on the mountains. And my mother would always say, "But the mountains were so beautiful." And I looked at the mountains when I was there and I thought, Mom was right. The mountains are so beautiful. This is like this horrible, unjust -- [coughs] excuse me -- messed up, stupid thing. And yet, yeah, at the same time it's going on, the mountains were beautiful. And she said, "Every morning I would get up and look at the mountains and just think, The mountains are so beautiful." And I think that's part 01:22:00of -- because my mom had such a difficult life with her schizophrenic mother and everything, she just learned early on as a coping thing to not forget the part of the glass that's half full, and that no matter what's going on there's something positive. And you're not making less of the negative, but you are just also not forgetting the positive. And I distinctly remember thinking, She's right. The mountains are beautiful. And my mom had passed on by then, you know?

And I was just glad. I think my experience of being there was just more -- just seeing how incredibly healing this was for our father. This was so good and so healing for Papa. And I think only later, I was 01:23:00processing, like, my father wasn't the easiest person to be around sometimes. He's very demanding, very strict. Nothing you did was good enough. "Oh, you got an A minus. Why did you get the minus?" Very typical Asian American, driving you to be perfect. And I think it was just another layer of understanding, like, how traumatized he was and how much his behavior has a parent was driven by the fact that he was so traumatized and just wanted things to be okay for his kids. And we had to be perfect and get straight As and get good jobs, because you never know when they're going to come and take it all away from you. But I didn't think that while I was there. That was afterwards, reflecting on it, like, Wow, he was so traumatized. He thought we were going to pull up in the car and there were going to be all these 01:24:00people walking around inside the barbed wire that were captive there. It was amazing.

TEWES: Do you have any interest in returning for yourself without your father now?

KITAZAWA: My first thought was as a legally blind person who doesn't have wheels, God, I'd just like to go to the grocery store and get food. I'd just like it to be easier to go to the doctor's appointments. It's like going to the Mojave Desert. Like what? Well, it's kind of like I don't see myself as getting there, just because, how am I going to get there? 01:25:00But I mean, I've been to Cambodia. It's easier to go to Cambodia, because you take the airport or bus, you get on the plane, you go to Cambodia, and then you go on the tour of Cambodia. But how do I get to the Mojave Desert? I'm not sure how one would do that. But I would like to go back if I can get a ride in a car and go there, because I would like to go see what they did now that they made it into a historical center. Because I think there's a museum there now and I think they might have reconstructed one of the barracks or something. I think that it's pretty changed from when we were there when it was just basically bare dirt and a bunch of half-dead plants. I would like to go see what they did with it, and I would like to go with someone who can drive who would share my 01:26:00interest in seeing it.

TEWES: Right.

KITAZAWA: It's something that I wish my kids were even vaguely interested in -- my adopted son from Vietnam and our birth daughter -- but they're just not. It's just totally not something they're interested in. I mean, not just Manzanar, but just the whole package.

TEWES: I want to pivot in our last few minutes together and ask briefly about your creative outlets. I know you are an artist in several different media. Can you tell me about some of the work you do?

KITAZAWA: Yeah. I'll talk a little about that. Before I talk about that, I think just something I want to say is that seeing the profound effect on my 01:27:00father of going to Manzanar, of the huge healing effect for him of going to Manzanar and of going to the Smithsonian exhibit with his buddy, Mike -- which I've also gone to see that exhibit myself -- and just the healing that comes. I just think that in general, African American history museum, slavery history museums, Holocaust museums, all those things for all people who've been through stupid stuff, it's so important, because it can bring healing for the people who actually experience these things or their offspring. And I also think that it brings more understanding to the general public, that these were real things. And something that I would love to see in our country, around the world, but especially here because I'm an American, I would love to see a 01:28:00fantastic like bunch of national museums in all the major cities, of something that combines like a museum. The Smithsonian kind of does this, right, because they have the African American culture and history center now and they have the part about the Japanese American. I would love to see it all in one museum, like this unification of all sorts of people have gone through this stuff and the commonalities between all of it, and what's happening to the Central American people who are coming on foot across Mexico now and being stuck in cages at the border. A museum where the theme is, yes, these things really happen and they're still happening, and they're happened to all different kinds of people. And everybody who's affected by these kinds of things, including very poor white disenfranchised European Americans, that we have this common 01:29:00ground, and we need to work together. And that's something that I care about passionately, and I would love to see museums and books and everything, that they're not so siloed. The Black people's thing and the Asian people's thing and the Mexican people's thing, I would love to see more cross-group collaborations. So that was the thing I was going to say and now I'll talk to you about my artwork.

TEWES: That's great. Thank you.

KITAZAWA: Unless you want to ask me.

TEWES: I think that was perfect.

KITAZAWA: Okay. My creative stuff, my writing and my visual, tactile art, I have absolutely no need to market it, sell it. I don't have a website. People are like, "How can you not have a website?" It's really easy not to have a website. I do a lot of it for just the process of self-discovery and self-healing. And then I've also 01:30:00found that in sharing it, by getting things published and by being in art shows, that it can have in a very small way the same effect that the Manzanar tour had on my father. Of people who feel left out looking at it and going, "Oh yes. That makes me think of my grandparents." I have a piece that speaks to my schizophrenic grandmother's experience, it's a piece of art. And I have a piece that is combining my parents' Manzanar experience with the current thing that's going on for Latino people at the border, at the US border. And I have haiku that I wrote in English and in Spanish integrated into the piece. Again, trying to tie together that it's not just one group that's having things happen, it's all 01:31:00tied together. My writing is like that, too. It's using my experience and my family's experience and trying to tie it together as well as I can with, in some way, everybody. Even the people that are doing horrible, terrible things from high up on to other people, it's like, What the heck happened to you that just destroyed your soul so much that you don't get what you're doing to other people? And one of my haiku in that one piece, I think it's in Spanish, is like, some line about, "How do we forgive the jailers?" And not to say that what they did or are doing is right, but unless we see those people as our fellow human 01:32:00beings, we are working from a place of less power. And until we see all people, all people, even people who are our absolute enemies, as our fellow human beings and try to understand where they're coming from, we're not going to be able to really change things. That's what I believe. I mean, we can change things, absolutely, always, but to really bring fundamental foundational change to the world, we have to know that everybody matters, and even people that we dislike and don't agree with, they matter. And that we need to listen to each other and understand each other's stories. That's --

TEWES: Does this emphasis --

KITAZAWA: -- something I believe. Sorry, go ahead.

TEWES: 01:33:00Does this emphasis on forgiveness connect to your religious beliefs?

KITAZAWA: Kind of. But I think that that's there in me, just like my parents' activism was in them before they were incarcerated. And maybe institutions and books and whatnot have helped give me vocabulary to speak about how I feel. I was raised outside the church. We only went to church very briefly. My father was an atheist, my mother was an agnostic -- although my father was raised within the Christian church himself. I'm not a really churchy person. I think about religion quite differently than many people do. I don't think of God as a 01:34:00big man in the sky who's going to fix things for me if I pray enough or if I'm good enough. I just don't see things that way. But there's a lot of research and stuff on forgiveness in more recent years. If we don't forgive, whether it's our sister, our literal sister, or our boss or whatever, we're suffering from that. Like living in a state where you have not forgiven somebody else takes away something from you. And it also really gets in the way of resolving problems. So I don't think that's so much from my religion. Yeah, I don't think it is at all really. It's just something I believe. There's a wonderful saying, which I've heard is not credited to anybody and I've heard it credited to different 01:35:00people, "Resentment is the poison we drink to try to kill the other person." And I think that that's true. If you harbor resentment and lack of forgiveness and anger, you're poisoning yourself and you're getting in the way of living a full, meaningful, rich life, and you're destroying the chance to work out things between you and other people. So that's just what I believe.

TEWES: Got it, thank you.

KITAZAWA: And it's not from a goody two-shoes point of view, like, Oh, you should be a forgiving, kind, caring person. I just like being happy and I like enjoying my life and I like being able to take in the world. And if I'm walking around thinking, Gosh darn, that guy is such a frigging idiot. Why did he do that? Da, da, 01:36:00da, I'm not having a good time. If I'm walking around thinking, Why did they traumatize my parents so much, what did they do that for, that's just horrible and wrong -- and it is, I totally believe that. And yet if I get stuck there, I'm going to be a less effective human being in working to correct things that are currently going badly for people, including for myself. And just being stuck in a negative place, it's not fun and it's not productive.

TEWES: Susan, this is a great segue to my final question for you. How would you define healing around this intergenerational history you have with 01:37:00 incarceration?

KITAZAWA: That's a good question for a nurse. [laughs] Healing, healthcare. I think for us to heal, whether it's physically or emotionally, it's like you have to let go and undo the damage and the painful stuff in our bodies. Grow new, fresh tissue and in our {inaudible} grow new, stronger, more useful ways to think about things. I for myself, I am a crier. I cry about a lot of things. One of my friends told me a therapist said to her, "Beneath almost all anger and rage is fear and pain. And so sometimes when we're 01:38:00really angry and enraged about things that are happening now or that happened in the past, what's underneath that? What's the fear, what's the sadness underneath that?" For example, related to incarceration. Just grieve what my parents went through. Just sit down and just cry that this happened to them and that it's horrible and that I'm going to do what I can do to try to not have it happen to somebody else. And sometimes, the healing process is difficult. I mean, like if you have an infected abscess wound in your leg, you can't just put a bandage over it. You've got to lance it, which hurts, and you've got to let the pus drain out and you've got to put stuff in there that might not feel too good to clean it, and then you 01:39:00can bandage it. And I think that emotional and spiritual pain is the same way, that you have to go sometimes deeper into the pain and the hurt and the woundedness before you can come out the other side and grow a fresh way of being, if that makes sense. Or even if it doesn't make sense, that's what I think.

TEWES: Yes. It does, thank you. Well, that's the end of my questions, Susan. Is there anything you want to make sure we add that we haven't already discussed?

KITAZAWA: No, not really. I just would want to leave people with the thought of just whatever each of us still needs to heal, which most of us have a lot of things we need to heal, that we just have the courage to keep working on that and that we also just reach 01:40:00across all the seemingly uncrossable divides between ourselves and other individuals or between our group and other groups and have the deep faith that it is possible to bridge those divides, as difficult as it sometimes -- or as impossible as it sometimes seems, given things that have already happened. So that's all.

TEWES: Thank you, I appreciate that. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate that, as well. I'll close us out here.

[End of Interview]