Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Ramsay Yosuke Mori Interview
Narrator: Ramsay Yosuke Mori
Interviewers: Tom Ikeda, Kelli Nakamura
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: February 28, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-mramsay-01-0009

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TI: And so, going back to, you were talking about your, your parents deep in conversation on December 7th, so what...

RM: Okay, move back to that point in time and, of course, nobody said, "We're gonna go to church today." They were just talkin' to each other." So I just hopped on my bike and took off. And of course that's what I remember. I remember riding up the hill. This is Alewa Heights and --

KN: Did you see anything, because you are in Alewa Heights overlooking Pearl Harbor?

RM: I think the things that were most obvious -- it was an ordinary Sunday morning, is what it was, quiet, still. I couldn't, I mean, it wasn't like, there weren't airplanes flying overhead. I mean, there were one or two that eventually came over the valley and there was actually an anti-aircraft shell that exploded up on the mountain later on in the day, but that wasn't all happening at that particular point. So I rode up to a point right above St. Francis Hospital and I could see over Punchbowl, over the hospital, over Punchbowl, and I could see from Diamond Head all the way across to Pearl Harbor there, and there were black puffs of clouds, hundreds of black puffs of clouds all over the sky, actually. And that was ominous because the target practice that they used to do, the anti-aircraft guns were always white, so these puffs of clouds were always white. And of course the armed rounds that went out on December 7th were all black, and so it was a very dramatic difference and that's the kind of stuff that, as a kid, you remember. And of course pretty soon another kid came up that I knew, so we were roamin' around up to where -- Tootie McAnlis, I don't know if you remember that name, but lived, he's a big football star and all that stuff, lived up on the corner, but he was bigger and stronger and someone you looked up to. [Laughs] And up to his house, turned the corner down there and went up to another lookout down there where you could see everything, all the smoke at Pearl Harbor. Of course, you couldn't define anything clearly because it's too far away, like it's, what, seven or eight miles away from there, but lots of smoke.

TI: And so what were you thinking? So black puffs, it's different than just practice, what were you --

RM: Well, we knew it wasn't practice. That, that's the immediate awareness that we had. And of course, pretty soon a cop came around and said, "This is," you know, "This is..." and you could hear radio calls saying this is the real McCoy, it's war. And the cop came around and said, "You people go home. Stay home," and chased us all away from that area. But that was very evident. And of course, what followed after that, of course, was, was also very significant.

TI: But at this point, did you know it was Japanese planes that were...

RM: We had no idea what a war was. [Laughs] Let alone, let alone the black clouds up in the sky. We knew it was something real whereas the white clouds were all practice, and these were real, but we had no idea that there was shrapnel flying around up in the air trying to get the airplanes. And of course, like you say, I, we weren't tuned into the fact that it was a war, but like I mentioned, an aircraft round came down, and of course we were tuned into bombs [laughs]. We knew what that was, 'cause, I guess because everybody shoots firecrackers off around, in Hawaii, but we knew what that was, so we, all the kids in the area rushed up to the mountain and were climbin' around Alewa Heights. It's a fairly brushy area, lots of what they call haolekoa and cactus, and we're up there on the trail lookin' for the bomb because we knew it fell down there somewhere. And of course, my parents were busy. In fact, at that particular point is, is the point at which they were picked up. It was still morning.

TI: So this is still morning December 7th.

RM: Yes.

TI: So even while the bombing or the fighting's going they're picking up, or is this right after?

RM: Well, my brother, my brother recalls my father being called away on an emergency, that a, the bomb had fallen in the middle of, where, around, close to the cannery, I think it was, and somebody had got his arm knocked off, so he had, or injured to the point where he had to amputate it, so he was called down to the hospital in the morning. So we knew it was not a normal morning.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.