<Begin Segment 11>

AH: Okay. So, now, what happens is, of course, that a real watershed moment for your family is the fact that your father, when he's publisher for this Rocky Nippon, is then accused of having, not writing necessarily himself, but having in his paper seditious material.

SH: Right.

AH: So he gets taken away in 1943, and it's kind of unclear to me if he went to Old Raton Ranch or did he go to Santa Fe?

SH: No, no. We first went to Lowry Air Force Base, and he was detained there at Lowry Air Force Base for quite a while, and we knew he was there because we heard that he had been taken there by the FBI. And then when he was in that Lowry Air Force Base, by that time my sister was the one in our family who was the one who was sort of the one who took over the newspaper.

AH: Right, the acting publisher.

SH: And so she was the acting publisher, so she also took over the family business sort of, and I don't know how much she, I don't think she knew anything about the bookkeeping or anything. She was just three years older than I, and a happy-go-lucky person. So that was not her interest, but she worked hard at whatever she could do there. And we were also working in the office every day, my sister and I, and then by that time, the people who were coming in from other, California, had been hired to help in the office, and so then my sister was supposed to have been talking to a lawyer because we all kept on asking her what's going on, and she would call this Mr. Dunkley, Ed Dunkley. And so she said that he said he was working on the case, and he would do the best he could to get my father home. And so then evidently -- and I don't know if this is true or not, because this is only what I heard from my sister -- and she told the people in the office, too, that there was a hearing one day.

AH: At Fort Lowry?

SH: At Lowry Air Force Base, at Lowry Air Force Base. And at that time, they asked my dad if he was loyal to the United States. And he said, "Yes, I am loyal to the United States." He told them, "I've been here since the early 1900s, I have never been back to Japan. I expect to live and die here." And he said, "As a result of this, I could tell you that my grave site is already there with my name on the grave stone." And so he told them that he expected to live and die in the United States. And then the judge asked him -- and it was just some officer who was presiding over it -- if that were the case, why didn't he get citizenship? And my father said, "Don't you even know the rules of your own country? We can't have citizenship." And my father, not being a person who was, would be very humble, he said it in a very arrogant way. And then they said because of that, they decided he had to go, be detained. This is the story I heard. So I don't really know.

AH: Well, let me just back up a little bit because I'd be very derelict if I didn't ask you this question. The pivotal moment for a lot of people on the coast was when their father got picked up, and after Pearl Harbor. Now, you were inland, and so you're outside of this zone and everything, but the equivalency was when your father got picked up. So set the stage, you weren't able to remember that about the Pearl Harbor thing, but what about this? What do you recall about the fact of somebody coming and removing your father from the home and leaving without the rock of the family, the intellect and the leader and the sage older person?

SH: Well, it was a real surprise, but we thought it was just to take him for questioning. We didn't think that he was going to be put into anywhere. We said, "Nobody from Colorado is going. They haven't said that. In fact, they're inviting people to Colorado. Why would they take him?" So it was like, it was just something, disbelief that he would be taken, but they came and took him. And so we thought it was just to question him. We didn't know it was going to be for good.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.