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MA: Well, I'll start with the fact that when it was declared, the war was declared, and when Roosevelt did this thing about the internment camps, the thing that, he came to us when he knew he had to leave. He said, he asked my mother -- and mostly it was talking to my mother 'cause my dad was usually at the shop sixteen hours a day -- so he asked if he could leave some things in the basement until he would return and retrieve them. And my mother, the house, as I said, was a large house, and the basement was probably divided into three parts. One half was a huge part that was never used. It had just dirt floor. And one was supposed to be for the tenant and one was ours, which were the two small quarters, and so Mama pointed out that that was for the tenant and, yes, you could leave these, his things there and return and get them. And so she never went down and looked, and so then in about, when the war had already started and in about 1943, I would guess, she happened, for some reason, otherwise never had occasion to, but this, the dirt section, unfinished part, had a little door, just a teeny little wooden door, not locked except for a little hook and eye thing, and she happened to look in. Well, it blew her away because it was wall to wall. You could not see the dirt floor. And it was just wall to wall with things. Well then she realized that he'd pulled a fast one and snuck all that into that section of the basement.

TI: Oh, so in the tenant area he had maybe a couple boxes...

MA: Yeah, nothing to give her any idea that there would be something different.

TI: But in that other area that wasn't really used, the dirt section -- and how large was that room? When you say wall --

MA: Huge. I mean, it was huge. That whole basement, I mean, the house widthwise was big.

TI: More than, so I'm thinking about, he just had the single room upstairs, I mean, more than what he even had in his room?

MA: Oh gosh yes. I mean, that section of the basement, of the half of the whole basement was enormous.

TI: Okay, so tell me, what was in there?

MA: Well, at that time, Mama said that she felt that it wasn't her place to look at the things, so she really didn't go through it. She just knew that that was all the stuff that he snuck in, and all she said was, when he gets back he's gonna be told that that was not a nice thing to do and be scolded. Well then, I have to go forward to the end of the war. He never came back. And then, in about 1947, my parents were in the throes of a possible move from this home to something else, and at that point she felt she had a right to look. Well, that's the part that was kind of scary, and that was that there were pictures of his two sons, very handsome, very meticulously dressed in these navy uniforms, Japanese Imperial Navy uniforms, and a very nice looking two young men, two young men that were very nice looking. And then she found a lot of pictures of Hirohito on his white horse. We found many articles and books, and that's when it became a little scary, because some of them you kind of got the picture of what was, he was thinking or what these entailed, what they were telling us.

TI: And so these were maybe like propaganda, maybe anti Japanese, or anti American?

MA: Yes. Right, yeah. There, nothing, we didn't read it all, but then they were sporadic, but the thing that was the most alarming was when we found some maps that were, had certain sections circled in red ink, and it was of the Northwest and primarily places like Todd Shipyards, things like that. I can't specifically remember the names of the places, but those were kind of what was going on in those maps. And then, on top of all of that kind of stuff, there were then cans of linseed oil, many, and why that I don't know, and then kind of the surprising part was that there were household things that was as if he emptied out his whole household, kitchen things, utensils, chairs. I mean, everything kitcheny, everything housey, not the other kind of things, which kind of indicated she must not have just been visiting. It just kind of gave that picture that she wasn't just visiting Japan if all her household was here. But anything that we thought was just total assumption because I knew nothing for a fact. But when we saw the literature and the maps, that's when I called the FBI, and I told them the whole story, and I said, "I don't know what to do with all these things." And he said, "Well for one thing, had your mother looked at those things in 1943 we would probably have ensued with an investigation and looked for him." Now, he -- I'm quoting the guy on the phone -- he said, "As far as I'm concerned, you had a spy in your house." Well, as I wrote my story and thought about it and thought about it, he made it sound so convincing that I began to believe it for the moment.

TI: And before, when he said that, had he come to the house and looked through the things?

MA: No.

TI: So this was just based on the description.

MA: The things that I described verbally. And so the only thing is, though, at that time he had me almost convinced, but retrospectively, not too much later than that, I thought about it and I thought, well, what makes that proof that he was a spy, you know? I mean, no matter what I described or anything that happened up to that point, I didn't feel that that was proper for him or me to assume that, yes, this man was a spy. I mean, there were indications of a possibility, but then not necessarily a fact. And that's when I wondered -- I think I talked to somebody -- that's when I thought, well, he may have been let, given an option to go to Japan from the camps if he so wanted, and so I assumed that maybe he did that, and then later said, oh no, they wouldn't have done that. But to this day that's the only thing I can come up with, because there still was no proof.

TI: Yeah, actually thousands of Japanese -- and many of them, or most of them Japanese nationals -- repatriated to Japan.

MA: To Japan, which he very possibly could've done, yeah.

TI: And so what happened to all this stuff?

MA: We, I think we probably got, called Goodwill and got rid of it all. And you know what? I'm so sorry because I think it would've been interesting to keep some of those things, and I might, if I had them today I would be able to show you what I was talking about.

TI: Yeah, that'd be fascinating. Especially, I think, it'd be interesting to look at the maps, I think is probably the one that I would be most curious about.

MA: Yeah. Yeah, and just to see exactly what was he thinking when he circled.

TI: Because things like photos and, even of Hirohito...

MA: Probably many of them, aren't there?

TI: It's kind of interesting, I think right after the war started, you hear the stories -- it was in that book, also, that you read, The Corner of Bitter and Sweet -- how many families were burning things, and they were often burning things like that, because they felt that by having that, that would cast some suspicion on them.

MA: Yeah.

TI: But it was fairly common for that.

MA: I could believe that.

TI: But the maps might've been interesting to look at. Okay. Interesting.

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