(light upbeat music) - This area, there's a bookshop called Ulrich's Books that was definitely a part of the old Ann Arbor character.

So I still have a lot of roots in terms of friends, classmates that are still in this area, not just Ann Arbor, but they've kind of moved around southeastern Michigan as well.

I would describe myself as having a typical Midwestern suburban white experience.

I haven't been exposed to Japanese American communities until about the last 10, 15 years.

I've now really kind of focused on trying to learn more about the Japanese American community to kind of learn how to become Japanese American.

It's my senior year of high school yearbook at Pioneer High School, the Omega.

Clever, right?

- So when you heard about our evacuation, were you in the States or?

- I heard about the evacuation when I was a student in the Ann Arbor public school system.

So that was about in 1980, that was my first exposure to the internment or evacuation.

- Did you have any problems at school?

- In terms of problems, no, I think discrimination was there, but at that time, you know, when we moved to Ann Arbor in 1978, and when I heard about internment in 1980, Ann Arbor as a city or a town is a little bit different than the suburbs of Detroit because it is a university town.

So the diversity was still better than it was in 1980 in Detroit.

So I feel that I didn't experience that much discrimination.

Of course, there was a little bit.

I never felt like I needed a strong community of Japanese Americans.

At this age in my 50s, you know, I am now getting to a point where I can find a Japanese American community to now bring that into my own friend network.

I told you, I'm a Nisei as well, second generation, my older brother in Tokyo, in Japan, he was suffering from asthma because back then Tokyo was industrializing very fast.

They just finished the Tokyo Olympics in '64.

I was born in '65.

Because there was so much air pollution because of the traffic, my father, he decided that he wanted to have the family relocate somewhere in North America, right?

He's always had an interest in trying to live and work in the United States or Canada.

However, the Immigration Act of 1965, you know, better known as Hart-Celler, although it did open up a lot of immigration to non-Western countries, the quota for Asia or Japan in this particular case was still quite small.

So he wasn't able to get a visa right away, not immediately.

So the alternative best at the time was to go to Canada.

So we did spend some time in Ontario, Canada, which happens just to be the Canadian car capital in that area.

And he's always been associated with the car industry being a mechanical engineer trained.

So I did spend some time in Windsor, Canada.

However, his final goal was to always try to have the family be raised in the United States.

So when I was about 12 years old in about 1977, '78, he was able to get a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Again, very much car associated, and that's how we were able to finally plant some roots in Michigan.

And that's where I continued my education.

And at that point in Ann Arbor, the public school system, when I was in ninth grade, a civics teacher or government teacher just happened to one day have a picture on the podium of the internment or the incarceration where little children were tagged.

And she just wanted to kind of expose the class as to this part of history about executive order 9066.

And just to kind of say, this is a little bit of dark history that people need to know about.

And at the time, I didn't know why she was bringing it up.

But in hindsight, after doing a lot of studying as an adult, 1980 is when President Jimmy Carter at the time had signed legislation about trying to investigate and understand the causes leading up to why in 1942, President Roosevelt had signed executive order 9066.

So that exposure kind of led me to start thinking, I need to know more about this.

And coincidentally, within that same week, one of my best friends, his stepfather was studying at the University of Michigan to get his PhD.

He asked me the same thing, "So what is your opinion on internment?"

Thinking that I might have had family history just looking the way I do, but I had to explain, it's like, "Well, I don't have any family history" because we immigrated post 1945, right?

But I think the general public, that little bit of nuance is kind of lost until a more in-depth explanation can be made.

Because, again, I am a Nisei, which is second generation, and you are also a Nisei, second generation, but we are of a different generation, probably 35 years apart.

It just kind of important that I make that explanation very clear because some people will just naturally assume that there might be some kind of history in my family.

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