<Begin Segment 16>

TI: Okay, so you were accepted to the reserves, you said, a week before Pearl Harbor.

JY: Yes.

TI: And so do you recall where you were when you heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

JY: Yes, clearly.

TI: So tell us about it.

JY: It was Sunday morning, I was in the boarding house on Sixteenth Avenue, Wisconsin, at Ma Brown's boarding house.

TI: And what was your reaction?

JY: Oh, it was just terrifying, because we knew that nothing was going to be the same anymore, and that marked question of what would be our fate from then on, and what would happened to our families on the West Coast.

TI: In your case, so while you were in Milwaukee or going to places like Chicago or just traveling in the Midwest or East, were there cases of you being, again, discriminated against, or because you were Japanese American, that things were more difficult?

JY: I guess almost just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor was Christmas holidays, and I had arranged to go to New York, and had tickets. But when I went to the Milwaukee Road Station, there agents approached me and asked if I were Japanese, and I was not allowed to leave the town.

TI: Because?

JY: I told her, yes, I'm of Japanese descent, yeah.

TI: And so they were, essentially, limiting people of Japanese ancestry to stay, to not travel.

JY: Uh-huh.

TI: So was that common? So did you know that, or was that the first time you heard about it?

JY: First time I heard about it. But my friend apparently knew about it, he was Chinese. And he had an "I am Chinese" button, and they let him go through.

TI: Was there any military reason for you to not move around? Because I know on the West Coast at that point they had curfews and the same thing, where they couldn't travel from, a certain distance, but that was in a military zone which was on the West Coast. I didn't realize that happened in places like Milwaukee.

JY: Well, the Great Lakes Naval Station was a big induction center, and that was, abutted close to the Milwaukee Road Rails.

TI: Okay, so it might have been a more isolated incident, that they didn't want a Japanese on that train that would go right by, because they might have thought, well, you could be a spy.

JY: Whatever.

TI: Okay, that makes sense.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.