<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Why don't we back up a little bit and why don't you tell me a little bit about your parents and how they got to Seattle?

HM: Okay. My parents, my father, came from a farming area in Japan. Initially he landed in California and he was farming in Huntington Beach. He was in partnership with another farmer from Japan and they were growing lettuce in Huntington Beach because they could grow multiple crops and they thought that was the way to go. And lettuce was in pretty high demand and unfortunately they used to get this black oozy stuff occasionally and that would cause them to have this splattering of black stuff when they used to cultivate the lettuce.

TI: So black spots on the leaves of the lettuce?

HM: Yes, so consequently my father decided well, both of them couldn't make a living on this farm so he sold his rights, his lease rights, to his partner. Well, the black stuff happened to be oil. During that time period, the lease rights had the mineral rights function attached to it. So as a consequence of that, of course, he made a lot of money. And the irony of it was, he went back to Japan and the family in Yokohama. And during one of the bombing raids that -- ironically my friend at Boeing happened to be the pathfinder pilot -- they wiped out this whole area of Yokohama. It was a fire bombing and demolition raid, and they wiped the whole area out. And my brother searching for that family in 1946, after when he was in occupation forces, found that the whole family got wiped out. So it was not a good thing to have made money and go back to Japan.

TI: So that's amazing... so this was your father's partner in Huntington Beach, made money because there was oil in this, underneath the ground where they were farming. He sold or got money for this, went back to Japan, Yokohama. And then you're saying that a friend of yours at Boeing... you could actually pinpoint him being the pathfinder for the raid that perhaps wiped out...

HM: I don't want to mention his name because he feels very, not embarrassed, but he feels that he led so many of the pathfinder raids in Japan. He led thirteen of them. And in fact at one point at Boeing, he brought in these so-called formerly highly classified aerial photographs, before and after. And they would make a reconnaissance flight to gauge the target areas. That was part of his job and they used to have the photo equipment, run over the target areas before the raid and then consequently, after the raid, they did the same thing to see what damage functions they had performed. But he had a whole bunch of these things and he brought 'em in one day and Seiya Sakurai who happened to work with me, lived in Yokohama during that wartime period. He was born in the United States and was brought back to Japan when he was about ten years old, before World War II started. And he survived through that Yokohama raid process. And in the examination of the Yokohama area, Seiya identified where he used to live and what had happened to his residence area, and it was all burned up. And he says to my compatriot, "You so-and-so, you bombed my house!" But that was part of the war.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.