Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Gordon Hirabayashi Interview II
Narrator: Gordon Hirabayashi
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda (primary), Alice Ito (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: May 25, 1999
Densho ID: denshovh-hgordon-02-0013

GH: And, and then one day, I'm dashing home. "Hey Gordon, it's five to eight." I grabbed my stuff and it takes about five minutes to get home so I was just dashing home, and it hit me. A question that I should've faced earlier, just hit me. How come I'm dashing home and all your time keepers are still there? I didn't -- I just needed the question to be raised. I knew I couldn't answer it. You know, without saying, "I can't do it." I turned around, and went back, to the library. "Hey, what's, what's the matter?" I said, "Well, you guys are here." "Well, we got work to do." I said, "Well, I got work to do too. I decided if you guys are here, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work with you. I'll go back when you guys are ready to go." Nobody turned me in. And I didn't take that until it hit me. And when it hit me I knew, gosh, I can't do it. That's two-faced. The only reason I'm subject to go is because of my -- the way it's stated. I'm a person of Japanese ancestry. In fact, there were, there were Canadians in the group, who weren't even citizens, but they didn't have to go. Well, so I couldn't, I couldn't accept it. And we left it that way. And then later on -- order to remove, go to Puyallup. ... If I couldn't accept curfew, how could I accept this? Soon as that question hit me, I knew answer, the answer. I couldn't, I can't accept it. It's worse. This is worse.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.