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GA: Let me take you back to 1937, '36, around there. When we were young, we used to have a block gang. There was a lot of Japanese kids within our block, that each block would have a football team or baseball team, and we would play against each other. One day, we decided, let's have this, what we called slingshots fight, which is referred to right now as spitwads. And we decided that, "Let's have a war against the next group and see who comes out ahead." And this was held between Fifth and the City Light substation on Yesler Way between Yesler and Jefferson, that was an area, it was a slide area, and it was kept wild. We decided we'll have a war in there, and somehow or another, I don't know which paper it was, but the, whether it was the Seattle Star or Post-Intelligencer, but there was a reporter there. And we started and they called us together and we all lined up on Yesler Way, and they took pictures of us. And we thought, "Oh, boy, this is good. We're getting in the papers." Well, the caption read that the Japanese Imperial Army has sent over soldiers to instruct us how to run a, fight a war. Now, this is back in 1936 when they said that, and why they picked Japan even at that time as an enemy is beyond me. But checking back on that, I found that all the comic books they used to have, they had comic books on war, and every time it was either Japan or Germany, and how bad the Japanese were. So when the war broke out in '41, all the kids in ten years had read up a lot about, bad things about the Germans and the Japanese, therefore they were ready to volunteer to go to the service. So when Pearl Harbor happened, there were many, many volunteers who were ready to go out there and bomb Japan and wipe 'em off the earth. Just to let you know that it was, that kind of a sentiment was going on for a long time.

TI: So that there was this bias, you mentioned the media, in this case, thinking that Japanese Americans would be predisposed to fight against the United States, that they were being trained to fight against, in some ways, the United States, from a very young age.

GA: That's right.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.