Interview: Janet

Daijogo
What was your day like?

Well, you woke up in the dust, ha, no. You woke up, had to go outside to go to the
bathroom. If it was cold, it was cold. Because the desert, it freezes; it's really, really
cold in the wintertime. Then we would go to the mess hall, ah it was called the mess
hall, where you ate the mess, I guess. You were served on metal trays, and you just
ate what they served. Suffice it to say, there was nothing memorable about the
eating experience there, except my brothers cabbage.

Then when it was time for me to go to school, I learned to walk to school. It was
on the other edge. We had blocks, and the school was not in my block, so I went to
another block. I went to school, and my school-teacher in the first grade was named
Ms. Light. She was a Quaker, and very loving. She taught me to read, so she was
always my hero after that. She put a picture of mine on the wall. So, I just felt very
proud. I think she was a very good teacher and very kind, because she was about
the only one I remember.

We pledged allegiance to the American flag every morning, because that's what we
did. It was in the corner, above, near the door. Then we did what little kids do. We
learned to read, we drew pictures, we had recess time. I think we went home for
lunch, and then returned to school. To me it felt like miles, but I was little then.

Remember, however; once, after school was dismissed, a dust storm came up. Dust
storms, if you've ever been in the desert, dust storms can become blinding, and
that's what happened. For a little while, this dust storm came, and there was just
dust everywhere, and I could not see. For some reason I was alone, or at least I
thought I was alone. I was terrified because all the buildings started to look the
same. I got disoriented, and I was so scared that I peed in my pants. I just was
screaming and crying. I just remember looking down and being so ashamed, as you
would if you were six and you had wet your pants, my legs were just dusty and this
urine was trickling down my legs, and thinking in the middle of this dust storm, "I
don't know how I'm going to get home, but when I do my mother is going to just be,

you know, whatever," of course she wasn't. Those are the thoughts that a little kid
has. The shame of that. Apparently the dust storm stopped, because here I am.

In the preliminary interview you mentioned a teacher that you had in Topaz. What
was her name?

Miss Light. Miss Emily Light.

What year did you have her?
I had her in the first grade because they didn't have kindergarten there.
What was class size like?
I have no idea. I would say there were at least twenty of us.
Did you have any other teachers there?
It's interesting, I must have had a second grade teacher, but I have no memory of
that. But I have a very clear memory of Ms. LightI have a sense of her, I cant say I
have an absolute clear memory because she conveyed to us that we were
important to hereach one of us was important, and she somehow motivated but I
had the sense she really cared and loved us. When somebody feels like that you can
basically teach them anything. As a teacher I know that now. She gave you
whatever she did, she did with a passion, so we learned things from her like songs
that she taught us. I still remember. Some of the songs are strange little songs. I can
still recall it and every once in a while I find myself humming it. Some of the songs
we knew but some I had never heard. I'm not sure if they came from her past, but I
never heard them since.

Where there any songs that you remember?

"Once I had a marble as blue as blue can be. And once while playing in the grass it
slipped away from me. And I have never found it yet and can't because you see it's
turned into a violet as blue as blue can be." I have a really rotten voice.

Do you sing this for your students?

I never have because just as we were talking about that, I thought, "I could do that,"
because now I could play the ukulele, which I'm learning to do. Music is like my most
low intelligence, when they talk about multiple intelligence theory, no doubt about
it, it's on the same gene as the computer. I could do that. Have you ever heard that
song? No. It's a "Ms. Light song." I think she taught us in the desert, I can see a
violet and I didn't even know what a violet was at that point in my life. Now I never
see a violet without thinking about that and it's like, "ding!" and violet and there's
something very loving in me that gets connected to that. It's her, it's her sprit.

Did you keep in touch with her while you were in college?

I did, I wrote to her from the time I could write in the third grade and probably we
communicated all through my high school, maybe just once or twice a year, but
whenever you wrote, she always wrote back in her beautiful long hand. When I was
in college she had a stroke and she still wrote, but she wrote with her left hand
which was very tenuous. She kept communicating and I wrote back until finally I
received a letter from one of her relatives that she had passed away. She was in her
80's and the retirement centerBlack Mountain, I think, in North Carolinashe died
there. I have to think it was a peaceful thing because she was very peaceful. That's
what she conveyed. I guess she was one of the early teachers and maybe an
important one. I thinkexcept in Urban School probablyI probably can only
remember five teachers in college and high school, but I always remembered her.
Maybe she was the reason I hang out with the little kids because I know what it
meant to me to be recognized and acknowledged as a little person and be
empowered by somebody recognizing who I was.

What was the structure of your school when you were there? I know you were young
but what were you learning in first grade?

I learned to read. We allmost of us couldn't read word by word, and suddenlyI

remember the day that she let me go to another group of better readers because
suddenly I just knew how to do it. You know how that happens? I didn't learn
phonetically, I think in those days we learned more whole word approach and
suddenly I could do it. It was like a miracle, it was the "ta-dah!" moment.
Was it English or Japanese?
It was all in English. I don't really speak Japanese. I wish I did but I actually refused
to learn it.

Can you read Japanese?

"N.O." But the daughter you met, Tayme, she's fluent and her Caucasian husband is
fluent in reading and writing and speaking.

You refused to learn Japanese?

I refused to learn Japanese. After relocation we went to Tokyo and we were on an

Army base. All my friends were Caucasian. It was like a Little America that was set
into the conquered country of Japan at that point. What we knew as kids was that
those Japanese were the conquered people and we didn't really want to identify, nor
could we, because we couldn't speak the language. My parents were both fluent in
Japanese and they tried tothey wanted us to speak it. They said, "Okay, at dinner
time," this was when I was in maybe junior high or high school, "We're just going to
speak Japanese so we can talk about our day and you can learn Japanese because
its going be a wonderful thing for you to be bilingual." We sat there at the dinner
table and we wouldn't say anything. Talk about slitting your throat, our magical
time, we blew it. Later I tried to learn it but it's difficult to learn it if you're not in the
country and you don't have anyone to practice with. Both of my kids went to Japan
one of them majored in Japanese, so of course she is totally fluent. The other one
was just interested. She learned enough Japanese that she could get around the
country. It was a regrettable decision that we made as children. We just didn't want
to do it.

Would it start making you more isolated from your friends? Or just nobody did that?

Nobody did that. All of my friends where Caucasian, there was nobody else on the
army basehardly anybody. I think there was one other Japanese American family
and they lived on another base. We went to school with them but I didn't know them
that well. It just wasn't cool. It had no relevance and I think we were trying very
hard to be American. I was told in Hawaii many, many, many years later that I was
"over-colonized." I would have to agree with them from that point of view because I
just really wanted to distance myself from that part of my being.

How did your parents feel about that?

They probably were very disappointed in some ways but they were also wise
enough not to insist or force because I think that wouldn't have served very much.
To be spanked into learning something I don't thinkas a teacheris a good thing.
We just weren't motivated.

Did you have many friends in the camp?

Yes, I think I did. I think I was a regular kid. I went out and played, trying to stay
away from my brother. I remember playing marbles, the boys mainly played
marbles, but I had a few of my ownwhen my brother didn't steal them. We played
jacks. Inside the laundry rooms it was very cool, because the concrete floors were
very thick and very smooth. You could sit down and play a game of jacks in the
coolness of that. I remember doing that with friends and playing simple games with
little bean bags and jumping rope. Old-fashioned things, that were probably good
for you.

I did have friends, and my parents had friends because I remember being in bed
and listening to the click of mahjong. They are these little ivorydo you know that
game? Mahjong? Hearing them laugh was kind ofa nice way to go to sleep is to
hear the older people chuckling and having a good time. And these little things, I
think you knock them over, I don't know, I need to learn to play someday. It just
always felt like they were falling with this very typical sound. So, I did have friends.

When I went to Berkeley, I was in the ladies bathroom one day. I was talking to a
friend, we were laughing about something, and this other women came over to me
and said, "Is you're name Janet Wunano?" Which it used to be. And I said, "yes." And
she said, "I baby sat for you, when we were in camp. I was a little older, I was five
years older than you or something." And she said, "I would remember your laugh
anywhere." Isn't that funny? She remembered the name just because of the voice.
It's strange.

Are you still in touch with any of the people from the camp that you met?

None, none, because we all went these different places. When we were in the
housing in Richmond after the war, there was one girl that was in my camp named
Lily, Lily Mayaita and she said, "shhh", and we recognized each other. But I have no

contact, thats an interesting question, with anybody. I stayed in contact with Ms.
Light my first grade teacher. I was still writing her when I went to Berkeley, to
school. She died, afterwards, sometime afterwards, but she would have been my
only contact afteraside from my familybecause we all, we are people that just
scattered to the winds after that. No migration to one place.

Were you sad when you left to the internment camp?

I don't think I had any particular feeling, except that we wereI knew my parents
were anxious because now the war was over, what were they going to do? They had
to make a new life. I was with them; I was eight by then. I just remember what it
was like to move to Oklahoma, after being in this dessert. We come to this very
luscious, is Oklahoma considered south? If felt south to me. People with this, with
this, accent, like "What?" "What did you say?" Also, I was aware immediately of the
segregation. Where there were signs, there was a sign that said, the black hand
pointed to this fountain and the white hand pointed to this fountain, I remember
running back to my father and saying, "Where am I supposed to drink water? What
am I? Am I black or am I white?"

The strangeness of that, the strangeness of being, this third, not black and not
white, but being Asian or Yellow. I'm not sure what they called us then. Realizing
again I was, that we were, in between these two places. The black community lived
on one side of the town and the white lived on the other side. My father was
teaching at that time, at Oklahoma A&M, he was teaching Japanese to the navy and
personnel so that they could translate documents and act and be, they conquered
this country, now they had to speak its language. My father was one of the people
who was helping with that. We lived in the white community, or thats where our
house was anyway. Again, just being frightened. The pavement literally stopped
where the black community began. And the pecan trees, I remember, there were
pecan trees there, on that side of town and we were not allowed to go there.