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SF: With the advent of Pearl Harbor, how did that impact your whole kind of life course, planning and projecting?

FM: Right. It impacted it very markedly. In the first place, it upset me greatly to have the event occur, because it raised in my mind immediately the question of how I would be received on campus. As it turned out, when I went to classes on Monday morning, students, in a sense were amazingly supportive of me. They, it was as if they sensed the difficulty of the position which Japanese Americans were now caught in; and they were sympathetic with me in a way that I had not anticipated, and I was really grateful for that kind of reaction among them. But the war moved rapidly, and the events in the community moved rapidly. The FBI came in and arrested a number of Issei leaders, and jailed them, therefore, the anticipation that things of this kind was happening around the community. There was concern about the anti-Japanese hysteria that was rapidly growing. And by the next two or three weeks after Pearl Harbor, we were constantly looking at the newspapers for attacks upon the Japanese American, or Japanese immigrant and Japanese American population here on the Pacific Coast -- the anti-Japanese feeling that was being generated in the mass media.

So yes, we were very seriously concerned about that. But in my own mind and in my, in the minds of most people, we were thinking in terms of the draft possibilities for the young men, we were not thinking in terms of evacuation or anything like that. Michi and I had been engaged to get married anyway and so we decided to move forward our marriage date. We got married at the Christmas break, in 1941, and had a very short honeymoon, again, under circumstances where we felt we shouldn't go very far away from Seattle. So we took our honeymoon down in Tacoma, of all things. And at that point also, if I remember correctly, for the Issei, there was a curfew that was coming in for them, and there were increasing restrictions faced by the Japanese community. So yeah, by that, the end of December, at the time when we got married, why, we had a very definite sense that the Japanese community could be in for trouble.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.