Densho Digital Archive - George Morihiro Interview (denshovh-mgeorge

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MA: How were you treated by the whites in, in Hattiesburg?

GM: Well, in Hattiesburg, we were treated very good. There was very, very little animosity against us. But the governor, of course, when we got, when the original 442nd guys got there, welcomed all the 442nd people and told them that, "You will be treated as white."

MA: Wow.

GM: That's what I think Danny, Senator Inouye was talking about that. He said when you first got there, he said, when they made that speech, he said, "You'll be treated as whites." And by the time we got there, we were treated very good. One of the reason I think is that these Hawaiian kids came to Shelby with lots of money. Lots of, lots of money. And the guys from the camps didn't have any money. But the Hawaiian guys go into these places and was giving everybody big tips, you know, $20, $30, 50 dollar tips. And they were surprised at that kind of a generosity. And I think the word got around that -- from what I heard -- of these, some of these cases, guys used to tell me when I was training, that, "Oh, So-and-so used to go in camp and throw his money around, or go into town and throw money around."

But I think it was, in other parts of the country that I saw, our train was going to camp Shelby, and I forget what town it was, Albuquerque or some town, train stopped at, we stopped the train, and our train was all Japanese. And when the train stopped, they told us to, "You got thirty minutes, but don't leave the station, because we're going to take off in thirty minutes, but you can get off the train." And we got off the train and got on the train platform, and we're going to go into the station, but now we had this problem: two doors, about fifteen feet apart, one says "colored" and the other one said "white." And we looked at these signs before going in, and, "Oh, my God, now what do we do? We're not 'colored,' we're not 'white.'" I kept looking, guys says, "Oh, the hell with it." They just, they all went into both doors. Some went into the "black" door, or the "colored" door at that time, and others went to the "white" door. I went to the white door, because that's the door in front of me. And when I got inside, then the commotion started. The stationmaster was all excited, he came running to the "colored" door, and kept pushing guys out, because said that, "You can't come through here," you know. And there's people behind him pushing to get in. And since these doors were so close apart, I decided, "What's going on?" I went over there, and the, I saw the, what was happening, so I got in front of the stationmaster and got pushed out. And came back to the "white" door, came back in, got in front of this guy, and he pushed me out again. [Laughs] 'Cause there was nothing in the station that was of interest, it was one big room once you got inside. So this stationmaster kept pushing guys out of the "black" door -- the "colored" doors -- and we kept going round and round in circles. Then the thirty minutes was up and he says, "All aboard," and everybody had to jump on the train. And we got into the train laughing like mad because, boy, that was fun. [Laughs] If you're going through the "white" door and coming out of the "black" door, and it was, it was really something. And then at the same time, people coming off the train were trying to get through the door. And here's this guy trying to push everybody out of that door. It was really a funny situation. Then you saw this discrimination in a real form there.

MA: What do you mean, "in its real form"?

GM: Well, you saw a white pushing out people because they're coming through the wrong door and everything, and these doors were for whites only, and colored people only.

MA: Were you surprised that the white people in the south considered the Japanese Americans white? Did that surprise you?

GM: No, that wasn't so surprising, but the surprising fact that I saw, not in person, but when I'm reading about it, was that the Chinese was not considered white; the Japanese were. Now, why would that be? And in South Africa, strictly, Japanese could go into a, a swimming pool, Chinese couldn't. Not with the whites. So, funny, isn't it? It's strange that the whites considered Chinese dirtier than the Japanese, yet you couldn't tell the difference there.

MA: It's surprising, too -- yeah, it's surprising, too, at this time when there's so much, you know, anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast and in general, that it would be that way.

GM: Well, there was that type of discrimination, that's really strange that, that you couldn't understand. And there was more respect given to Japanese, even though they were "enemies," sort of, in their eyes, if you compared it to Chinese and Japanese Americans.