<Begin Segment 18>

TI: Yeah, I want to then, when you talk about your mother, there was an incident -- I'm moving now to 1941 -- where two gentlemen came to your place and, and they were speaking Japanese. But why don't you tell that story?

MT: It was in the fall of 1941. I came home from junior high school and we had a rule in our family that none of the children can go by themselves into -- not by themselves -- children could not go to the front door; we had to always go through the back door. Only if we were accompanied by an adult can we go through the front door. So I came home and the door was ajar, and being a kid, twelve year old kid, I said, oh boy, I could sneak in if the door's open, so I start to go in and I heard Japanese voices. I said, "Oh, okyakusan," we visitors here. So I decided that I would, I had to go through the back. I went through the back, through the service porch, the kitchen, and since we didn't have a central hall I had to go through the dining room to go to my bedroom to do my homework, and I peeked and I was shocked. The two visitors were white and one man was speaking Japanese. So I went to my bedroom and started doing my homework and then when I heard the, the visitors leaving I went out there, and my mother at that point said that she was so ashamed because he spoke such beautiful Japanese that she was ashamed. And I, she could speak beautiful Japanese, but to hear, see a white person speaking perfect Japanese with no accent at all was just a big surprise for her. He was a son of a missionary in Japan, American missionary in Japan, and he went through grammar school, elementary school and through college, university in Japan, and when he graduated he came to the United States and that's when the, the FBI recruited him to become an interpreter. My father's reaction was a little bit different. His reaction was, "They knew things I had forgotten about." They knew everything about him, every trip he took, where he went, everything he did. They knew everything about him and he was just shocked that he knew, they knew so much about him.

TI: So things like the fact that he served in the Japanese army --

MT: Oh yeah.

TI: -- that he was in Bellingham and --

MT: Yeah. All that. Terminal Island, he was a fisherman, all those kind of things, and he was a vice president of the, of the Wakayama Kenjinkai, their prefecture association, he was vice president of the Japanese retail produce association. And he was deaf, but they, because he had a business they wanted... because he had a fairly large business, he had a dozen stores and things, that they wanted him to be a vice president for the name only, 'cause he couldn't, he couldn't participate in a lot of these things. And he also -- I took kendo, my brother and I, younger brother and I took kendo before the war, and, and then he was the vice president of that association. And then what happened is that all those things were against him. They knew all about that; they knew everything about him.

TI: And so why were these two men there to talk with your father?

MT: They were just interrogating him to find out if there were anything else and if all these things were true, to make sure. And so, as many people know, there was a ABC list of potential enemy aliens and he was on the A list, 'cause on December 7th, somebody rang the doorbell at eight-thirty in the evening. They were FBI agents, wanted to see my father. My father was waiting for 'em. He was --

TI: Before we go there, going back to the first meeting, back in the fall before December 7th, do you know if the FBI, were they looking for other names, too? I'm trying to think, going back to your idea of the ABC list, I'm trying to get a sense of how they constructed those lists and --

MT: He never talked about that and my mother never talked about that, and I don't know. I don't know. See, one of the things is that when, when Tsurukichi Maruyama, Maruyama Tsurukichi, when he came to the United States he was the head of the Kendo Association in Japan, came to our dojo, where we practice, and he saw us practicing and so forth. And my father, they must, I'm assuming they must've had a reception for him. We would, we won't be invited, but he had, he received a calligraphy from him, which he posted on the wall -- and my brother got it, now his son has it -- but later I found out, after the war, that he was the head of the Black Dragon Society in Japan and those things are all against you, of course. So just being, taking kendo is not the problem; it's problem of meeting Maruyama Tsurukichi.

TI: So the FBI probably had that under surveillance. They probably knew who was there, who you met.

MT: Exactly. And you don't know, it could've been a Japanese American that was, was doing that for 'em. We don't know.

TI: Are you aware of any other examples of, again, before December 7th, of the FBI or other authorities sort of watching the community?

MT: I did not know that, but I had heard that one of the wholesale house employee -- I know who it is, I won't name who it is -- was reporting, had reported him to the FBI. He was a JACL member and he reported him to.

TI: He reported whom?

MT: My father.

TI: Okay, so he was turning names in.

MT: Turned it in, 'cause he mentioned it.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.