<Begin Segment 23>

AI: Well, because the, you had mentioned the paper, even though we got the chronology a little bit out of order, could you tell what you, what you wrote about, about the incident and what you wrote about?

EH: Oh, well, the incident was... we were just trying to have a modest New Year's Eve party of udon, which is kind of traditional. Soba, I guess, is the traditional thing. And we used the church kitchen, we had this little party and did a little dancing, and, and when it was time to leave we decided to go to a New Year's Eve movie, which was not that out of the ordinary, but when I dutifully called my mother from the theater, inside the theater, and said, "We're, we're going to see a New Year's Eve movie, okay?" And she said, "No. Come home." And very adamant, and, and, and I was really stuck and embarrassed because two carloads of us had paid. Even if it was a quarter a movie, that was a precious quarter in those days. And so here two carloads of us had to pile back in the car. My sister Martha was also there. So we all dutifully had to go home. And I don't know how they felt. I never got a chance to even discuss this with any of my friends after that. I was embarrassed, I was angry, and when I got home I didn't even go in the house. I sat in, on the front steps for, oh, at least two hours. And my sister dutifully went in the house and (had) no problem. My mother was fixing the traditional New Year's food, and I guess she expected us to be typical Japanese daughters and fix the food.

I never got around to asking anybody what, what their reaction was, but I wrote in the paper that, "Here we are in America. My, my hakujin friends, my Caucasian friends, are all going to New Year's Eve balls with strapless gowns, and here we can't even got to a New Year's Eve movie." And so by the time I wrote that paper, I could digest the fact that, okay, this is a cultural issue, and... but that was interesting, and the poor professor appreciated the paper, but we never got a chance to discuss that either, because... so it must have been pretty close to evacuation. He was a very, very good person, and I think he was a popular prof. And he called me in a month before evacuation and asked me, "What could someone like me do?" And I, I said, "One of the things that's happening is people are frantic about trying to save their furniture. A lot of us were in rented property and we need, we wish we could find some place to store furniture." We fortunately, the owner of the building was allowing a returning Japanese missionary to use the house, but then it was his responsibility to rent the upper floor. And we left... we were able to leave, then, our furniture as it was. A lot of it... a lot of our stuff Mr. Inai allowed us to store in the basement of this two-story house. So that was... but I said to Dr. Tyler that if churches or even the college there, if they had some open space or a warehouse or something, that there were people who really would be thankful to be able to store pianos and things like that. And I never got around again to asking him, him if that, that...

Well, evacuation was so rushing, there was so much to do at home, and our grades had to be... we had to get signatures from all the profs, and we all took a... as I remember, we all took a grade point loss, because we weren't going to be there for exams. And, and I mentioned the black matron in the ladies room, that took care of the ladies room said, at least to me, she said, "This is just the beginning. Keep your spirits up." I wish I could have gone back to her after evacuation, but I, I didn't. And I'm not sure if she would have even been there. But anyway, that was, that was probably one of my first awareness that minorities had something in common. And I barely understood what she meant. It didn't take a year for me to realize what, how much she meant, but -- because normally, well, she, she was a very dignified kind of person, and I don't think, matrons aren't supposed to come, get into conversation with the guests that use the facility, but she was able to give that little brief bit of encouragement.

With my neighbors, we never even got a chance... I don't think we even said goodbye and things like that. Things were so solemn, and I think we were feeling very self-conscious. The other thing I did, the papers would come out -- even before Pearl Harbor we were hearing and reading about sabotage and fifth-column activities, and all the more -- and an article, headlines would come out about Japanese farmers purposely locating themselves next to airfields and military establishments. And I just wrote that, and I wrote a letter to the editor to say, "These farmers have been there since the early '20s, long before there was any air-, airport or military establishment." They had no... I don't think we had any idea that the war was coming this way. And I thought it was a decent letter. When they published it, it was so garbled you couldn't understand or make sense of it. And that, to me, I, I was a, again, I was a freshman, so I think, okay, here's my first experience with yellow journalism. That's the attitude I took. A couple people at church kind of commended me for the letter, so they must have been able to decipher it, but I was so angry because the letter... you couldn't recognize the letter. But that kind of thing I think went on a lot. There was a lot of garbled... you know, the issues of Japanese fliers that bombed Pearl Harbor were found to have U.S. class high school rings. And that kind of thing never disappears. I mean, there, there, probably the majority who read that still believe that. The government issued, retracted a lot of saying that, a lot of that kind of thing. Every pilot couldn't have been a high school, American high school graduate.

There was another item that... I had to deal with a milkman who, who just convincingly told me about some place in, how the... well, this was here in Seattle, but how the farmers helped the Japanese pilots by, by in some way planting things. In fact, I, I had a male beautician who apparently went to Ingraham High School, and he said that was in the textbook, and he had a Nisei social studies teacher who never denied it. And I said, "I don't care what the social studies teacher... but that is not true, and that has no business being in the textbooks." And I went home and told my, my husband, who was a social studies teacher. And he said he hadn't, he hadn't ever seen that in print, but I should go back to him and ask him what the title of the textbook was. Well, this guy was ten years out of high school so I, I couldn't. But that, to me, that was another lesson: by golly, I guess we better stand up and speak out loudly if that kind of thing comes up in print.

AI: But at the time, it sounds like you were one of the few Nisei who did --

EH: Oh.

AI: -- reply with a letter to the editor, or that you were one of the few who actually spoke out publicly in some ways.

EH: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

AI: Was that right?

EH: (Yes), probably. I, I don't remember any other... and actually it was such a busy time that people probably couldn't stop to do that.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.