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TI: Were there any other incidents like this that you can recall as you're growing up, again, in prewar Seattle where, again, you felt like you weren't an American?

HM: Yeah, a couple of times, I guess. My brother, he had a friend named George Sekiya and they were ham buddies. George was a, he was a really enthusiastic ham operator. In fact, when the war started he wanted to join the Navy because he was a ham operator and he thought he could do some good for communications systems. [Chuckles] He tried to join the Navy. But before that, we went down to see the Tacoma Narrows Bridge inaugurated down in Tacoma. George had a, I think he had a '39 Chevrolet sedan, at that time. That was his father's sedan. But we drove down to Tacoma and we never realized, or I never realized, that at that time that Tacoma was a hotbed of anti-Asian feelings ever since the Chinese labor gangs used to be thrown out of Tacoma. They used Tacoma as the base for bringing the Asian employees for the railroads into Tacoma. And they had some very interesting race riots down in Tacoma. But nonetheless, when we went down to that ceremony there was a area where they had, we didn't realize that was dedicated to some invited guests and we had unfortunately gone into this area. When we did that, they had some very interesting remarks about the Japs and, you know, all these dirty... I guess it's kind of uncivilized language that they used. [Laughs briefly] But I thought that was not really should be forthcoming from these individuals. We didn't do anything wrong.

TI: And who were these individuals? Were these officials?

HM: They were officials from the State Highway Department. That was another indication that... by that time I had grown up, quite a bit older and guess I had seen other instances where we were treated not like other people but because we were Asians or Japanese.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.