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VY: Yeah, and now we're talking about the war. So why don't we talk about what happened to your family the day -- I don't know if you remember -- but the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor?

MM: Anybody that's Japanese American remembers the day, December 7, 1941. I mean, it changed your whole life, it changed how we were treated, it changed how the government treated us, how the schools treated us, the hostilities that you didn't know existed came out. It was just quite shocking. And when you look at that video of my brother, says, "Well, do you remember December 7th?" And both of us said -- and we hadn't talked about it before -- said it changed our life. And if you talked to anybody that was alive at that time, no matter how old they were, it changed their lives. Disbelief.

VY: Yeah. So what happened afterwards?

MM: So my father was working for the American Bridge Company, and he's continuing to work for the American Bridge Company all through the war. I don't know how they did it, but they had some arrangement that he was allowed to continue working for them. And they worked in military things, but he still worked for them. So they must have trusted him, or I don't know what it is, because he certainly wasn't a citizen. And there was an accent, he looked like it, and one day he was picked up by the FBI because he looked like a suspicious character. He's been going over across that bridge for the last fifteen years, so suddenly he becomes a suspicious character because of the war. And they pick him up, and Mother doesn't know where he is that particular time, this is a child's memory, they have these spools with four spikes peeking up. And you take this, and your assignment as a child, eye-hand coordination, and you put this around and you weave it over and it comes out like a knitted string, and then you make a potholder out of it or something, you sew it together. But that's your assignment, homework. Well, Tod came home with a big ball like this, and this little spool. It's like a spool of thread only the wooden part with four nails. Well, when I got up the next morning, the red ball was gone, and I know how long it takes. She was so worried, she did this, she had to have to do something because she didn't know where Dad was, they wouldn't allow him to call her. So they come home, come to the house at midnight, and they say they're the FBI and they've been holding him. And, of course, (the FBI did not) let him call home, "I wouldn't worry so much." And they came in, and they wanted to see everything in the house, they looked at everything in the house, they looked at the sleeping children. And then I looked at the library, oh my goodness, all these books in Japanese. Well, they made, he made him open every single book, make sure, and tell them what's inside of each book. They were all engineering books. But they wouldn't just let him open one, two, three, and then presume the rest, they had to go over every single book and it took a long, long time. Then they took away the shortwave radio, they took away our camera, and they told him he couldn't go more than seven miles from the house or something like that. His family could go, but he, being Japanese enemy alien now, he didn't just have to register as an alien, he had to now register as an enemy alien. It was, it was shocking. So most people have pictures of people's childhood, these pictures are for special occasions. Somebody, for Boy Scouts, or your class picture, but you don't have any family pictures because of the taking away of the photography.

VY: So they took away your photo albums?

MM: No, they took away the camera. You could keep your photo albums but you had to give up your camera and the shortwave radio and you could only have AM.

VY: So you couldn't take any more pictures?

MM: Yeah, so we have no pictures of when we were kids and our friends.

VY: And your dad was still allowed, they brought him back home and made him go through all of the library books. But he was allowed to go to work, because it was within the radius, the seven or ten mile radius, but he couldn't go anywhere else.

MM: No, he couldn't.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.