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MN: Now, many Japanese Americans in the United States remember December 7, 1941. What was it like in Japan December 8, 1941?

JD: Well, all we had was just a radio report and then the newspaper came out, and many people didn't realize where Pearl Harbor was or what, what is it, so it's, just the military people knew more than we did. And the people, general people were very ignorant about, unless they knew the geography well, but Pearl Harbor itself, Hawaii, they know about where it is, but Pearl Harbor didn't make sense to people. But anyway, the war started because of that. And there were always, on the radio there was a certain program hour there'll be a, very militaristic music would start, there'd be announcement of the war news. And at the beginning, of course, Japanese army or people are doing very well in the service, you know, every city we captured, the city we captured and bombed and so forth. All that news came through. But of course we were very happy for each other.

[Interruption]

MN: So once the United States got into war with Japan, how did you feel about this?

JD: Well, I was just caught in the situation, as age, age ten you couldn't do much. Just horrible feeling that, not being able to see my mother and siblings again, that was sort of a sad feeling, and what's gonna happen to me now? So you couldn't do much anyway, whatever my thought was.

MN: Did you consider yourself a Japanese or an American?

JD: I was more American. I had American citizenship, and I think my father changed, made into a dual citizen, at the time you could do that, and beyond that probably just American citizen kind of stayed in the background, faded and never, never mentioned. Didn't want to get into trouble.

MN: How did the school, your education, start changing once Japan got into the war?

JD: Well, there was, there was a situation when you get into junior high school. You would be taught English as a subject, and there was an argument that they shouldn't study an enemy language, but again, there's a philosophy that came out, you have to know the enemy and doing so you got to learn their language, so there was an argument there and the junior high school I attended I had an English class available, so they taught English. And I did, I did have an uncle that taught that school, English, so he was a graduate of Waseda and was, he was an English teacher, and probably that's one reason I went to that school.

MN: Now, what would the food situation be like?

JD: That's interesting. Grammar school I think it just came, I guess there was a payment, but I never got involved in paying, so it was all my parents' doing, so I didn't, I had no concern over how they paid the school, the equipment or teacher's salaries and such had no, no relation to me. I had no, I wasn't thinking about it.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.