Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Grace Sugita Hawley Interview
Narrator: Grace Sugita Hawley
Interviewer: Megan Asaka
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: June 3, 2009
Densho ID: denshovh-hgrace-01-0006

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MA: And what happened to your bakery and your family business? Was that affected by...

GH: Yes. Well, that's when they took my father in, a few months after December 7th. And they took him in and questioned him. And then, at that time, they decided that my grandfather, who is the, who was still an alien, he wasn't a citizen, and he, I think he was the major stockholder. And so they froze most of the funds, and so it was hard to operate. The way they were, they were on twenty-four hour schedule, and they had all these trucks delivering, all these orders, they couldn't perform all these orders, schools around the island and all of that. So I think the business went downhill. I don't know the details of how they managed, because what do you do? Tell the schools, "We can't make you bread?" I really don't know the details of it. And we should have asked my father more about it, but it's only little of the conversation I got through his talking about it. And then trucks, too, they donated some trucks to the Red Cross and let them know how loyal they were, you know, to the government. And so they donated some new trucks, in fact, to the Red Cross. Of course, they accepted it, and still took my father in.

MA: So let's talk a little bit about that, your father's arrest. So that was, you said, a few months after Pearl Harbor?

GH: I think it's around February. I think it was around February.

MA: And do you remember that day he was arrested and what happened?

GH: I remember coming home from school and the FBI was there ransacking the house, and they were tearing through the Shinto shrine. We had Buddhist and Shinto there, and they were tearing up, tearing it down, and then just going through everything. And I was so scared when I saw that, "What's happening?" We had no clue why they were doing that and why they were there. And then they said they had to take my father in for questioning and just took him like that without packing anything. He never came home, he never came home. They took him in and he said he was under those bright lights and they were interrogating him for hours and hours. And the treatment was not the fairest, but what can you do?

MA: And he was an American citizen as well.

GH: Yes. That's what he kept saying, that he's a citizen, and that it's unfair, the treatment. But there were a lot of citizen as well. Not all of them were Isseis. But there were quite a few.

MA: You mean in Hawaii?

GH: Yeah. I think there were quite a few citizens. But my dad being a citizen, they didn't give him passes to leave the camp. They didn't give him a lot of rights that they gave others. They withheld a lot of that from him for some reason, some suspicion they had. So that's what he was very, very unhappy about, and he kind of rebelled, but it took a long time for them to finally give him that freedom.

MA: And so going back a little bit, he was arrested and then you kind of had no idea where he was. And when did you find out, finally, where he had been taken?

GH: I'm not sure except that my mother finally found out that they took them to Sand Island. Because first they were at immigration station and they interrogated them, and the police interrogated them and the FBI and all that. And then they were taken to Sand Island, and it turned out there was a camp there for Japanese, German and Italian men, only the men. And then later on she found out that they could go and visit them, I think, once a month or something, on a ferry. They can go across the ferry and visit them. And I don't know if she was able to bring things for him or whatever, or clothes, I don't know what he wore there. I don't know what they wore, come to think of it.

MA: Did your father ever talk about his time in Sand Island or what that was like?

GH: He talks about, he talks about certain incidents. You know, like to pass the time away, they used to pick up shells, it was at a beach. Sand Island is a park today, but they have the beach, and they used to find shells and polish them and he had a collection of them. In fact, I think he gave, he gave some of those shells to my nephews, and so they were a collection. Beautiful what they did, because they had so much time. Except that it was pretty demeaning on the kind of things they had to do, like doing latrine duty. My father never lifted a finger. And he, for him, it just, he couldn't believe he had to do all these things and they were just like any other prisoner, they have to do it. But they learned to get along and all that. But he had some interesting stories to tell, but I can't remember too much of it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.