<Begin Segment 8>

TI: Ramsay, I'm gonna now take you to December 7, 1941, that Sunday. Can you describe what your day was like on that, on that Sunday?

RM: Yes. It's, it was very distinct, and I remember it specifically because it was a day that I didn't get hassled to go to church, get dressed, that kind of thing. I put on whatever I wanted and I went out on my bike because my parents were both involved in very deep conversations, which they should've been, 'cause I think there were a number of reasons why they were aware of what was going on and one reason, one reason why they had a warning of something occurring was that the, my mother at the time, I got a, I should explain that, was a Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent, and it had to do with the fact that, it enabled her to stay in Honolulu, the job itself, and so she talked the people at Yomiuri into hiring her as a correspondent, social correspondent. But she received a call like three or four days before the attack and a political correspondent -- no, it may've been two days before the attack -- the political correspondent, which I can't recall the name of, started asking her about troop concentrations, how many airplanes, how many ships in the, in Pearl Harbor, that kind of thing. And of course she wasn't that technical about military activity and so she decided she'd hand the correspondent over to my father, who was much more technically oriented and would be able to answer. Now, my, on the other hand, my father was one of these very methodical kind of people and so he started figuring out, okay, here's a society correspondent calling from Japan and they want to know what it's like in Hawaii, so he decided, okay, it's midwinter in Japan, "I think it would be kind of fun to talk about all the flowering trees in the yard," and so he started talking about all the -- this is on radio phone, not the kind of phones, telephone we got nowadays. It was, anybody could listen to it that had a shortwave radio, and when he started talkin' about the trees with red blossoms on there and little further on another flowering tree that had been in the yard and kept going around that way, and of course the Military Intelligence people were glued to that damn conversation, without my parents ever knowing, and they had taken everything down. And of course, colors of flowers in certain kinds of trees became battleships and cruisers and number of people, that kind of thing, and they made sense out of whatever the conversation was about.

TI: So the Intelligence people were somehow interpreting the, the talk about the garden into the ships.

RM: Yes. There's a, there's a man named, a historian named Slackman that worked with historical documents in Pearl, at Pearl Harbor, the intelligence stuff, and he wrote a book, or he, he published a book that was called, let me see...

KN: The Orange, or The Orange Race.

RM: Oh yeah, the, the...

KN: He didn't call it the "yellow race," he called it, like, the "Orange Threat" or "Orange Race."

RM: This had to do with, had to do with Patton. He's about a colonel at the time. Still playin' polo in Hawaii, but it had something to do with the disposition of the "orange race," and I have it at home, so I should've taken a look at it before I came down, but...

TI: So he was the one who tried to, to say that, making that linkage between the...

RM: Well they, they, in the book there is a page with a list of people that should be, should be dealt with in the event that Intelligence needed to something about, and of course the war was every reason to collect these people and, of course, my grandfather's name and the telephone number, I even remember to this day, was 69512, was the old telephone number, and that is clearly shown in that book. Patton and the Orange Race, that's it. And it was a plan that Patton had, had devised to collect the critical people for intelligence reasons, and my grandpa was on there and my father, I think, as well as the Sogas, other people that we knew pretty well. And I never realized that, but it definitely sent some pretty big shivers up and down my spine when I saw that.

TI: And these were essentially, we talked about earlier in terms of almost class, in terms of community, your family was very prominent.

RM: These, this is, these are, were set up by Patton because of their importance and having some influence in the, over the population at the time, I think.

TI: So the real community leaders, in essence.

RM: I think that would be the best label for that, yeah.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.