<Begin Segment 10>

TI: But what were feelings, do you think, of the people in Boise about the Japanese and what they had done?

RM: Oh, they, well, the immediate response was the "Yellow Devils," and, and dropping "Japanese" in the newspapers to the word "Jap." And ferocious adjectives and adverbs to describe Japan's hit, surprise attack. And when the Japanese people who were in Boise -- there were small numbers of them -- and in, I don't recall direct confrontations with them at that time. And I, as I said, '41, I was still in junior high, but there were, I know the Itos and the Shiotanis and there were three or four other Japanese families there. I don't recall any hostility in the classroom to them. There was, later, when I was in ROTC. I was asked why I marched behind a Japanese, and I said, "He's not Japanese to me, he's, he's a long-time friend." And he was.

TI: And this is ROTC in college?

RM: High school.

TI: High school?

RM: Yeah, when I, when in the tenth grade, you went to high school, ninth was in junior high, and we didn't have clothes, very, very good clothes, because my brother and I --

TI: Okay, this is right. I got confused because, because the Japanese stayed in Boise. They didn't have to go to the camp, so they were --

RM: No, they weren't, they weren't incarcerated. We had -- I don't know where he fits in, what time he came governor -- but we had a mean bigot as governor. There wasn't any question about his hostility to the Japanese people.

TI: This is Governor Chase Clark?

RM: This is Chase Clark. And I, I certainly knew him around the capitol when I was selling papers, and in fact, I was aware that the family were deep in the China lobby, the Chiang Kai-shek lobby, even then. And I, and it bothered me, and I don't know why it bothered me. The Clark family bothered me. The opportunism of the family to take advantage of events to, and to rant and rave about the Japanese. And I couldn't believe he was put in charge of the trial, but that's another story.

TI: Later on, we'll get to that later, but so, boy, I'm thinking, during this period in high school then, the war's going on, you had Japanese Americans families still in Boise.

RM: Yes.

TI: And the sense was that they were pretty much accepted because they were, they were...

RM: There were so few of them, and they couldn't tell whether they were Chinese or Japanese. For most, for most Boiseans, they, they were lapped together, and we had Chinese there. And we had one -- they had, we had a Chinatown, and Saturday night, when I was a kid, we'd go have, with my friends, high, junior and high and high school friends, we'd go have noodles on Saturday night in Chinatown. And so, and I know they didn't know the difference between Chinese and Japanese, the Boise people. Never did learn to distinguish. And there were far more Chinese than Japanese in Boise.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.