Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Joseph Frisino Interview
Narrator: Joseph Frisino
Interviewers: Jenna Brostrom (primary), Stephen Fugita (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: June 20 & 21, 2000
Densho ID: denshovh-fjoseph-01-0016

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SF: Joe, last time we were talking about your experiences with Pearl Harbor and first of all, the action and some of the folks around you, how they reacted to the news of Pearl Harbor. Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about how you think people on the West Coast were reacting to Pearl Harbor and perhaps the Japanese.

JF: Well, this is just, would just be hearsay, really, but when my wife tells me stories, my mother-in-law told me stories, and I didn't get here until spring of '43, so a couple years after Pearl Harbor. So I really, I had no firsthand knowledge of what the civilian people were doing at all. I just know what we did in the military. But I guess, I guess the main, the main fear was from, for sabotage and, there were always these stories about the very curious milkman who disappeared after December the 7th or the, the grocery store owner, Japanese grocery store owner who was no longer there. And you wondered, people wondered, did he somehow get back to Japan with a lot of information, and fear of being so close to Boeing, of air strikes. We mentioned, I don't know whether we were on camera when we mentioned the submarine alert that we were on, but that was always, that was always a possibility in the civilians' mind, apparently, that something like that was going to happen.

My mother-in-law was a kind of, kind of lady who tried to help people. And for instance, she helped a lot of Chinese with their immigration to the United States. She, my wife knew a lot of Japanese Americans, youngsters, because they were in her class at Garfield. Garfield at the time had a lot of -- Garfield High School -- had a lot of Japanese Americans. And my wife knew 'em, and she knew some of the sad stories that these families told later of their encampment and so forth. But my mother-in-law tried at first when these Japanese people had to suddenly leave and sell everything, that she was trying to put stuff in storage for them and things like this, which she simply became overwhelmed. There was no possible way that any one person can do this. But she, she had some pretty good friends who were Japanese. But I don't, I don't know very much more about that subject.

SF: When did you first learn about the Japanese American friends that your wife had? Was that in '43, or was that quite a, quite a bit later?

JF: That was later, later when I came home from overseas. But we, well, before, before I went overseas we were too busy courting to be talking about anybody else. And once we got married we only had ten nights together before I went overseas for two years. And so our conversation didn't head in that direction.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.