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-01-0013

<Begin Segment 13>

TI: Right before the break, we were talking about a Japanese reporter that came to Seattle and lived with your family for several years. He went back to Japan and then he came back and then right before the war started he was called back and he was, at a big dinner, talked about how war was imminent between the United States and Japan. I just want to do a follow-up question with that to ask, how did the Isseis feel about this? Did they also feel that war was imminent between the U.S. and Japan?

HM: A lot of them felt this way. They felt that it was a matter of time and they were trying to make a decision in the 1940 time period whether they should all go back to Japan or send the kids back there or... try to resolve this issue and make the best decision possible for their own families. In fact, when they did the Enemy Trading Act and when all the import-export companies got shut down, and that really hit our grocery business because we were not getting any more of the supplies from these companies. And the second thing that happened was when they shut down the banks, the working capital that my dad had was frozen in those banks, and they shut them down. You couldn't draw enough money out or deposit money or nothing. So that hit our grocery business very heavily. And consequently he asked what we should do in case, for the sake of the family. Of course all the kids, we wanted to stay here. And he said he doesn't know what's going to happen to us if we do stay, in case there's war. My mother was very, very apprehensive about what was to come. She would say well, "I think you guys are going to be all right," meaning the children, "but there might be things done to us that might be kinda different." And so she was trying to warn us that there was going to be some kind of cataclysmic type of event that's going to be on the horizon.

TI: What's interesting to me is here you have a Japanese reporter who is knowledgeable about what's going on between the countries, feeling war is inevitable. The Isseis pretty much also feeling, something's going to happen and yet the general American public was caught totally by surprise that something would happen between Japan and the United States.

HM: Well, the Hearst newspapers weren't. They were, like the Seattle P-I was a Hearst newspaper, and they were vehemently anti-Japanese. And so everything Japan did in China and the Asian sector, was a point of criticism for Randolph Hearst and his empire. In fact, this is kind of an afterthought, but the Randolph Hearst newspapers, I think about nine years ago on February 19th, published an apology to Japanese Americans.

TI: I wasn't aware of that.

HM: They had a very interesting article in that editorial page saying that they were guilty of mass racial discrimination. And they really laid it on the line which was kind of interesting. But that was when the editorial staff kind of changed in the Hearst system.

TI: What publications did that come out in? I'm curious, I want to follow up on it. Was that the Seattle P-I?

HM: No, it was in the San Francisco newspaper, their main flagship newspaper. Hearst had a kind of favoritism towards China and Chiang Kai-shek and he felt that everything that Japan was doing was totally against the best interests of the United States. So consequently the yellow peril type news coverage was totally against Nikkei, and Nikkei America for all that goes, because it reflected on us. But in terms of what was transpiring between July of '41 it became more clear as time went on that there was gonna be war and in fact, in October of '41, the Hikawa Maru, which was the steamship that NYK line, Nippon Yussen Kaisha line used to go between Yokohama and Seattle and they would inbound into Honolulu. In that time that, that ship came to the United States, this was October of '41 now, the Hokubei Shinbun which is the Japanese newspaper, had on the top line, "Last Boat to Japan before the War." My dad looked at that and says, you know, he thought that was kind of premature but nonetheless, he thought they were right. He said to us, well if we wanted to pack up and leave we could go. [Chuckles] My sister was the most vehement saying that she wanted to stay here.

TI: Are you aware of very many families who upon reading this and realizing that war was inevitable, decided to go on...

HM: Several families did that. At that time, Ira Nagaoka used to do the radio (operator) for the Hokubei newspaper, and as he relates it to me when we were doing the redress process -- Ira happened to be the secretary of the JACL chapter, by the way, at that time -- he was telling me that he was the radio receiver operator for the Hokubei that would get the transmissions from their news service on, I think it was something like 18 megahertz. He would transcribe this thing in roumanji and then he'd have to convert the roumanji into Nihongo. [Laughs] During this process, because roumanji is English written and the final characterization is in Nihongo, sometimes they used to get the translation kind of screwed up. [Laughs] He used to say, what was the consequence of some of these screw-ups. And I think in that sense, that the report about war being imminent, I think was kind of a premature translation or slightly incorrect translation, that's what he told me.

TI: That's interesting.

HM: So the guy that wrote the Japanese part of it in the newspaper, took a little bit of extra liberty in terms of how that material was presented. Because he received it in roumanji and he wrote the thing down and he didn't think it was really that accurate.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.