Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Henry Miyatake Interview I
Narrator: Henry Miyatake
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: March 26, 1998
Densho ID: denshovh-mhenry-01-0012

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TI: And so when you came in contact with people from Japan, did you feel, what were your feelings towards them?

HM: I thought they were pretty interesting because all of them were people of some capability and some standard of excellence, they were of some professional category. And the one person that came to our place to stay for awhile was a reporter from, he was a newspaper reporter for a Tokyo newspaper, the Mainichi newspaper. And he also was doing press releases for, I think, the Domei news organization which is like Reuters or one of these other outfits. And he used to live at our place, and this was starting about, it was before the war in Europe started so it was probably in '37 or something, around that time period. He used to write articles about the Nikkei in the United States and also about some of the different businesses that we were involved in and also the different industries that Nikkei had some involvement in.

TI: This is interesting. How did he come to live with your family?

HM: My father's... there was some kind of relationship with my father and one of my father's brothers that lived in Japan. He was connected with one of the newspapers. And this guy was, he wanted to use Seattle as a baseline because he was going up to Alaska, and then he was going down to California. So he stayed at our place for awhile and then he'd take a trip up to Alaska. Then he'd come back and write all the articles and send them off and then he'd go down to California and write some more articles and send 'em off. I never thought about it until real later on but I don't know... he was a very smart guy. He was lots smarter than what I would assume a newspaper reporter to be because he had a lot of information about things like the kind of airplanes people are developing and all this kind of stuff. And my brother used to make these model airplanes and at that time some of the airplanes that were coming onstream that they were making models of were the military type airplanes, like the German airplanes. The Germans were developing some of the stuff for the Spanish-American War. I mean not... the Spanish Revolution. And the Germans were involved with the forerunner of the Luftwaffe aircraft. Things like the Messerschmidt 109, which was the high performance fighter aircraft, started to appear in some of these conflicts in Spain. Because of that there were models being built. And I think one of the interesting part of it was that this reporter knew everything about this airplane. My brother thought gee, this guy is really smart. [Laughs] This is a pretty new airplane and not too many people know about it and he's making a model of this thing and the guy knows all about it. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he was doing some intelligence work in the meantime alongside with his reporting job. But he had a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things. Even ham radio operator stuff that my brother was involved with, he knew quite a bit about different things in terms of communication and things of this nature.

TI: That's, that's really interesting.

HM: But as it turned out -- while he went back to Japan in 1940 and then he came back to the U.S. again. And then about the time they did that Enemy Trading Act which was July of '41 -- he was called back to Japan. I remember that when he went back, that we brought him down to Pier 41, and on the way back to our house, my father says, "Well I guess that might be the last time you'll see that person." But he was always very realistic about what was happening in the Far East, especially with the relationship between the U.S. and Japan.

If you're a student of Japanese American history, in 1939 U.S. started an embargo process of keeping Japan from having military supplies and so forth. In 1940, they had this restriction of oil being imported to Japan and rubber importation, scrap metals, things of this nature. And then in July of '41, they instigated the Enemy Trading Act, which is, it's a World War I act that still is enforceable in Congress. They stopped all the commerce essentially from, between Japan and the U.S. And that meant they stopped all the businesses that were involved in import-export functions. Anybody that was dealing in scrap metal, sending it to Japan, their businesses were stopped all together. The banks that were involved in monetary functions between Japan and the U.S. like Yokohama Specie Bank and Sumitomo Bank, they were seized by the Justice Department. And all the stuff that we were getting from the import-export companies, they were just completely stopped. So their business was taken over by the Department of Justice. At that point in July of '41, it became kind of obvious that there was going to be some kind of confrontation, I don't know what kind, but when this reporter came back the last time before he went back to Japan, we had a pretty big dinner for him. He said very frankly that he sees nothing but conflict coming about. And he thinks it's going to be a military conflict, it's just a matter of time, when we had war between U.S. and Japan. And he sees nothing other than that, he sees no hope of peace.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.