<Begin Segment 12>

TI: Yeah, that's... so let's go back to, to Victor. You said he was picked up, held for about ten days.

RM: Yeah, twelve days, I think it was.

TI: Twelve days, and so they released him, did, what was he like when he came back? What, any, was he changed in any way?

RM: He describes the feelings in a little booklet that he wrote, and now I can't remember. I can't, I know he, he's got heavy beard. I remember his beard was all grown after two weeks with no shaving, and of course, he was amazed that they just simply checked the record, found that he was seventeen years old and a high school, high school junior and from a prominent family, and they let him loose. They didn't even give him money for carfare, but I think he had some to get on the bus and get home. And he was amazed because all the stores that used to be open and people walkin' around the streets were gone. Stores were all taped up so the glass, glass wouldn't break, that kind of stuff. And he came home on the bus with no problem. Nobody hassled him.

TI: Do you recall him saying anything to you, after he got back?

RM: No. No. I was a little too young. Nobody confided in me. And then, especially with my behavior going in the direction it was going in, nobody's gonna confide anything in me and trust me. [Laughs] No.

KN: Do you think that was common among the internee families, that the children who were left behind, they kind of scattered to all different directions?

RM: No.

KN: So you were kind of the exception?

RM: I think that, for most people, they got, they got very normally scared. For me it was a huge adventure. I tell you, like, as an example, during this wartime period, you're talkin' about four years, so there was a battery up on the mountain and they had to be fed, and there was a big empty lot right across from our, our house, and so they made a kitchen encampment right across the street. These are just ordinary GIs, cooks, people that do the dishes and all that stuff, and they were across the street cookin' for the guys up on the hill that were watchin' at the gun emplacements and stuff like that, watching, what do you call that, watching the ocean and stuff like that. And so I went over there to see what the hell's going on and they had a big, like a two and a half ton truck and they're running over a coconut, so I watched 'em for a while and kept runnin' over the coconut, and of course nothing happened to it. I mean, the truck would bump up on the coconut and bump down. And so I think they finally gave up is what happened, and so I went up and I -- they had beaten on a coconut with a hammer or something like that anyway, because it had marks on it -- and I walked over there and I picked up the coconut, went back to the curb where, where there's a cement edge and I started bashing the coconut on, on the curbing. And all of a sudden I hear somebody going, "Hey Joe, look, look at this kid. He's gonna open that coconut." By then I'd had, had the stem part soft already, so I could start peeling off pieces, so they watched it, all came out and watched me open up, this little kid. And like I said, until I got to ninth grade I was still the smallest kid in class, but opened up this coconut. "Joe, this kid, the kid opened up the coconut." So I became a big sensation there. They gave me cookies, they gave me candy, everything out of their c-rations. They had chocolates in there. They gave me all that stuff, and of course they, being the mess tent, they had more than the usual rations, so I had all kinds of stuff I'd bring home. And like I say, it's always a great adventure and these guys were really very nice to me, whether I was an "enemy alien" or not. They didn't know that one of the big spies of the whole, whole December 7th situation had just been living in that house a day earlier. They weren't at that level of information. [Laughs]

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.