Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Mii Tai Interview
Narrator: Mii Tai
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Spokane, Washington
Date: March 14, 2006
Densho ID: denshovh-tmii-01-0011

<Begin Segment 11>

MA: So I'm to go back a little bit and ask you, we talked a little bit about Pearl Harbor and what happened after Pearl Harbor, but, so do you remember hearing about it for the first time, that Pearl Harbor had been bombed?

MT: No, not before I came home from church, and then I put it on. Yeah, that was a shocker.

MA: What was going through your mind?

MT: We were just, just listening to it, not realizing what had happened, really. But, uh-huh, yeah, I think my father was very worried because right away, they took away Mr. Kasai and Mr. Hirata.

MA: The FBI took them away?

MT: Uh-huh. Just dragged 'em right out.

MA: What was the reaction in the community after that happened?

MT: Well, I don't know what the community, but we were, everybody was getting very scared, what's happening. They thought everybody's gonna get dragged. In fact, my dad thought that we were gonna have to go to camp, too. So he got scared and he burned all the pictures of his nephew and stuff that were in the Japanese army, thinking that that would be bad. Yeah, I remember that.

MA: And were you scared yourself? I mean, did...

MT: Well, not really shaking and scared, but knew that something bad was going on. I was in, see, '41, see, so I was in high school. Oh, yeah, that's my senior year, I was seventeen probably. But it was good; it wasn't good to put all the people in camp, but all things bad like that had a silver lining in that it dispersed them and they became more what they wanted to achieve in life. Because I hear a lot of the people in Seattle couldn't even find jobs after they graduated out of the U of W.

MA: So you see the camp experience as kind of positive in a way, because people could move all over the country?

MT: Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, I heard that the fellow who made the beautiful, for your World's Fair, that lace work, he built that big building back east. Yeah, he was one of those who built it. Yamasaki or something?

MA: Do you remember, you said that the FBI had taken away Mr. Kasai and Mr. Hirata. Do you remember the FBI presence in your community?

MT: No, I didn't, no. They kept them, you couldn't find them, no, but they were there to see if we were up to no good. And I wasn't in that group, you probably heard about Sumi and Joe Okamoto's wedding, and see, they're older than I am, so I, all I heard was what happened afterwards, that they were all locked in the...

MA: So what happened at the wedding? Can you...

MT: Oh, the FBI came and wouldn't let them out, they couldn't go out. So they got held up there, but I wasn't there because they're older than I am.

MA: And this wedding happened to be Pearl Harbor, the same day, right? Or a day later?

MT: I don't know exactly... was that the same day? Same day, Kazue says same day. Yeah, that was, I'm sure that just upset everybody, scared the dickens out of 'em. But, you know, it's good and bad. You look back and you could see the good that it did, but it's not so good the way it was done.

MA: How much were you and your family and your friends aware of what was going on, like in Seattle, with the evacuation and camps and all of that?

MT: We knew something was going on there. You know how it is when you hear something like that happening, you hear about it, and oh, but you don't know the real full impact of it until you really get, you're mixed in with it in some way. Yeah, no... but yeah, there are a lot of Japanese from Seattle came after they were incarcerated, and then they came back to Spokane under sponsorship, yeah. Then we had fun.

MA: Did you hear from those people about camp? Did they talk about it?

MT: Some, but not that much, no. Yeah, even those soldiers, just like the soldiers, they don't like to talk about it, so they just don't say anything. But I know it wasn't good.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.