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TI: So I want to now move to December 7, 1941, and so can you describe that day for me in terms of what happened for you?

MY: Well, I still remember very vividly that morning. Al and I were asleep and we had the radio on between our two beds, and this war came up on the radio and was nothing we believed in. It was some program, and yet it seemed to be a little unusual for a Sunday morning program, and that was about our first realization that there was something going on. Although there's the whole background issue regarding war because we were aware that there were, if I may use the, "war clouds" there by 1941, '40, if not back into 1939, between the Japanese community and its preparation for, whatever preparation they were taking, if any. My mother used to send lot of -- for lack of a better word -- care packages to Japan, and I used to go mail them to the post office, but that was about the only indication that we were doing something as far as the situation in Japan was concerned. We weren't quite -- no, I shouldn't say that, because my brother was already in Japan and he was sending letters to my mother in Japanese, which I couldn't read. I was unable to, I could have read them, but it was not mailed to me. And then, naturally, Mother's conversation would bring up what my brother was doing and what my grandparents were doing with the so-called care packages going.

TI: And going back to those letters, did you, even though you didn't read them, did your mother share kind of the news from your brother and what he was doing or anything?

MY: No, not particularly.

TI: But was there a sense that in Japan they were perhaps preparing or thinking of war, perhaps more than the American side?

MY: Let's say that they... the message I got via my mom was that times were hard because of something. Well, something, in retrospect, was war, naturally.

TI: Okay. So go back to December 7, 1941. You listened to the radio, you heard something and that was an indication that something was going on, and then what happened?

MY: I don't recall what happened subsequent to that. In Japantown or... I went to school. I remember vague thing about Lowell High School. There was really no mention of the war, to me. Everybody knew I was Japanese. I was totally accepted within that group of people at Lowell High School. There was no so called rednecks that I was associating with, so there was no discriminating me as the enemy at that point. I was still active with Vice Principal Monroe's office, helping out in whatever I could. But gradually I think I stopped going to school, we're talking of January, and by late January I think I just stopped going totally.

TI: And why was that? Why did you stop going to school?

MY: I don't know. I just don't remember going to school. It seemed the most logical thing, I suppose.

TI: How about your Japanese friends in Japantown? Did they stop going to school?

MY: I don't know. I don't know.

TI: Do you recall any conversations you had with your friends from the Japanese language school or the Buddhist church or anything like that during this time?

MY: No, no, I don't recall any conversation relating to the current events.

TI: How about the treatment towards your parents of the people they worked for? Were there any incidents that they had to deal with by being Japanese?

MY: As far as I know, my dad faced no changes in his work situation. His relationship with any hakujin was good. There was no political influencing of any kind either way.

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