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TI: Okay, so let's move on to December 7, 1941. Do you recall where you were when you heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

MN: We were home, it was a Sunday morning, and we heard it on the radio. And then immediately the neighbors, a few neighbors, would look at us funny. We're Japanese, you know, "enemies within us." But some of them stopped talking to us. Some of them, nothing mattered. I mean, they were still our friends, embraced us. School made a difference. Some of the classmates didn't have anything to do with us. I remember when the notice to evacuate came out, a teacher asked me, "When are you leaving?" That's something I'll never forget. For an adult to say that to us, "When are you leaving?" And no one ever called us to our face that we were enemies or "Japs" or anything like that, but we could feel it. The closeness and the friendliness wasn't there anymore.

TI: So it was kind of like, just the tone that people used, and their voices?

MN: Yeah. But the friends we did, who were friends, remained friends, and I'm thankful for that.

TI: So I'm curious, the friends that remained friends, did the topic ever come up about the war starting and the Japanese?

MN: No. I guess, I don't remember their ever bringing it up. Just never said, "You're a friend, the war makes no difference." They never said that. But it was felt by reading the paper and all that, because we were taking the L.A. Times in, of course, everything was in there. And we knew that people were feeling that animosity towards us. But I guess we were more... what's that word? We rolled with the punches. That's what it was, shikata ga nai, we just did it. We just survived.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.