<Begin Segment 12>

MN: Let me get into the war years now. What were you doing on Sunday, December 7, 1941?

BT: I was at my friend's place, Japanese American, and then with my German friends. We were shooting basketball in the backyard. And we're having a good time, then his brother come running out of the house and says, "Japan bombed Pearl Harbor." Well, we looked at each other and says, "Where's Pearl Harbor?" Says, "It's in Hawaii." We say, "Oh, okay." So we went back playing basketball. It didn't, we didn't think it, we weren't concerned.

MN: I guess by then you're playing basketball, so you finished your newspaper route that morning?

BT: Yeah. Newspaper, I usually finished by seven o'clock.

MN: So after Pearl Harbor, did any of your newspaper customers give you a bad time?

BT: Not really. Except this one man, he had a mom and pop grocery store. When he saw me coming in he says, "Oh, you want your money, huh?" He says, and he reached under the counter and pulled out a, this Sunday pictorial section, and it had a caricature of Tojo on there. So he said, "Here, you can have this." I just froze. I didn't know what to do or say. Then he says, "Oh no." He says, he took it back, said he, he paid for the paper. That's the only incident that I had.

MN: How long were you with the paper after Pearl Harbor?

BT: Not too long. About two or three weeks later the distributor called me in the office and says, "People don't want Japanese to deliver a paper, so I have to let you go."

MN: How did you feel when you heard that?

BT: I don't know. I don't know why, but I didn't take it personally. I said, "Oh, okay." I went home. But as it turned out, I would've had to quit anyway, because the martial law came in right after that.

MN: But then before that you got another job.

BT: Yeah, for a short while there, I think just one or two months. I, this guy gave me his Japanese paper paper route, so I think I had that for about two months. Then the martial law came in, so we couldn't go out anyway.

MN: You're talking about the curfew and the travel restriction?

BT: Yes. We had to be in our house from eight p.m. to six a.m., I think it was. And if you have to travel more than five miles from your home to a job, you had to get an okay from the army.

MN: You had this, I guess a little bit of a joke with your friends, about when you knew the eight p.m. curfew was coming along, when you were listening to the radio?

BT: Yeah, we'd be standing out on the sidewalk talking, this and that, and we always, Fred Waring's program came on the air at eight o'clock, so when we hear his theme song we say uh-oh. So we jump over the fence and get into the yard, made a joke out of it, yeah.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.