Densho Digital Archive - Floyd Schmoe Interview I

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EG: Today is Wednesday, June 10, 1998. I'm Elmer Good. We're at the Ida Culver home, house in Ravenna, talking with Floyd Schmoe. Mr. Schmoe is a lifelong pacifist, a peace activist. Through World War II era he worked for the safe and well-being of the Japanese Americans before, during, and after the war.

[Interruption]

EG: I wonder if maybe you would like to say something about Aki for the tape?

FS: About Aki? Aki?

EG: Yeah. Would you like to put something on tape about her?

FS: Aki Kurose is, to my mind, one of the most remarkable women I have ever known, and I have known quite a few remarkable people, including Michiko, Empress of Japan, Liv Ullman, the famous Norwegian actress, and so forth. But Aki had everything. And the thing that made her, kept her alive was optimism, enthusiasm. Everything she did, she did enthusiastically. I don't think she would have lived as long as she did live, if it wasn't for that optimism of hers.

Unfortunately, her whole family seemed to be... well, let's say cancer seemed to be endemic in the family. Hugo, her oldest son, is in remission now. Ruthann is in chemotherapy, I think, and Aki was hit hardest of all. First she had a kidney removed, and then it went to her spine, a tumor in one of the vertebra, and that was extremely painful. She was in sedation, she was treated by acupuncture, she was... she was in constant pain.

But when she was active, she was still... she was a remarkable person. An elementary school teacher with a master's degree, working for a doctorate in science, physics. She was named a member of a commission on elementary education by President James Carter, when he was president. She was able to teach arithmetic, language, other elementary subjects during the day, and then go on to the campus and teach microbiology to graduate students. Her classroom was a museum, a laboratory, at one time, a fish hatchery. She got a big tank, aquarium tank, about 4 by 8 feet, full of fresh water; and she got a few thousand fertile salmon eggs from the College of Fisheries. And her students watched the little elver hatch out of the eggs, and then they fed them every day a prescribed diet until they were so-called fingerlings, about the size of sardines. And then it was time to turn them loose. So they put 'em in plastic bags full of fresh water, took 'em down to Carkeek Park, Carkeek Creek, and turned 'em back to salt water, turned 'em to salt water. There they, those who survived -- probably only a small percentage -- those who survived would have gone through the normal salmon migration pattern, three or four years at sea and then back to the source of their beginning, to the roots in fresh water where the eggs were laid, two or three years before. I don't know that any of them came back to Carkeek Park, but I'm quite certain there are some big fat salmon out there trying their best to get back into Aki Kurose's classroom. [Laughs] She had a 6-inch reflecting telescope. If there was a comet in sight, they had class, they had night classes to watch and to learn something of astronomy. If a Monarch butterfly came by while they were at class, they immediately began learning the remarkable migration of the Monarch butterfly. She had...

EG: Well, she was a great teacher for the children.

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EG: When did you meet her? When did you meet Aki? When did your association together start?

FS: When did the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?

EG: When did it?

FS: When.

EG: December 7, 1941.

FS: '41. I was at Friend's meeting Sunday morning when the meeting house was then just across the 42nd Street entrance to the campus, and we heard paper boy hawking papers, "Read all about it," hadn't heard that for a long time, "Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor." We had at that time four beautiful, young Japanese American girls, university students, from Yakima Valley living at our home with us in the Lake City area, and I had a son and a daughter who were also at the University, and they all drove together every day to the campus. Well, when we came home from meeting that Sunday morning, we found these girls just frightened. They knew it meant war and they had a pretty good idea of what might happen to them. They left immediately for home in Yakima Valley. [Pauses]

I then set up a regional office of the American Friend's Service Committee, and we were going to try to prevent the dislocation, internment. And I needed a secretary who had connection with the Japanese American community. I don't know where I first met Aki, but I remember she came to my office asking for a job, and she was so bashful that she brought her older sister Fusae along to talk for her. Well, I hired her, perhaps a hundred dollars a month, I don't know, not very much. And we began visiting Japanese families all over the area to see if we could help in some way. And Aki didn't speak very good Japanese even, and she couldn't type, but she was a joy to have in the office, and I fell in love with her.

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FS: And when it came time that she had to go -- there were more than 500 students and faculty of Japanese ancestry on the campus at that time, and the president named a committee, which I was on, to find, transfer to other colleges so that they would not have to go to the relocation centers. I then visited, on university faculty expense, about a hundred different schools and colleges outside the restricted zone -- that is, from Spokane, east -- to ask them if they would take these students. Most of 'em were very good students. Only three colleges said, "No." One of 'em, surprisingly, was Princeton University. I don't remember their excuse. Another one is a religious college in Idaho... Boise, I think, who said they would be glad to have them, but the sentiment of the community was such that they wouldn't be able to protect them, and so they thought they shouldn't take them. I've forgotten what the other school was, but all the ten Quaker colleges, eight outside the restricted zone, were glad to have them.

<Begin Segment 4>

FS: Reverend Emery Andrews, who is a Nisei pastor at the Japanese Baptist Church, had a van. He called it... well, it had a name, Blue-something. And Guilford College at... in North Carolina, who at that time was still segregated, would not take black students, would be glad to have all we could send 'em. I was well acquainted with the vice president, Floyd Moore, and he said, "Send them along." So there was a curfew on in Seattle at the time. No Japanese were to be out after six o'clock at night. Well, we picked twin sisters, Koriyama sisters, and one young man, Willy somebody -- who, someone said about him that he was so American that he was lazy. [Laughs] And the train east left at ten o'clock at night and to get them there was a violation of the curfew. So we put 'em in the back of this van and covered them with blankets so no one would see them going down to the King Street Station, and we got 'em on the train without being apprehended.

They were a great hit at Guilford -- Willy because he was a good basketball player, the girls because they were just lovely girls. I hadn't heard much, although Dr. Moore, Floyd Moore, vice president, mentioned 'em every time we had contact. But I hadn't had any direct contact with them until a couple of months ago, Aki invited me to lunch at a little English tearoom down in the University Village called the Queen Mary -- you probably know it -- and she said she had a couple of other guests who wanted to meet me. They turned out to be these Koriyama sisters.

EG: Imagine that.

FS: I don't remember their first names. Now they were middle aged women of course, and they both live here in Seattle.

<Begin Segment 5>

FS: Well, you were asking me about Aki. It came to the place where we thought, or we knew, that she had to go also. So I sent her to a Quaker college in Wichita, Kansas, called Friend's University, where my wife had been a student, where I met my wife, Ruth, and where one of her sisters was a registrar. And she lived with Ruth's family, my wife's family, for a year there. And then... I can't trust my memory on dates, but anyway she came back from the freshman year in Wichita to the University, and stayed through her master's degree at the University. And while she was teaching she got this job at... elementary school, Laurelhurst Elementary. While she was teaching then she was working toward a doctorate in physics. The woman who could teach peace, international relations, love, understanding, could also teach doctoral degree candidates. The Seattle Times published a list one time of the ten most influential people in Seattle. There were only three women on the list. One was Kay Bullitt, who owns the Times. I think the other was Dr. Rice, Mayor Rice's wife is Ph.D., and Aki. The three most influential women in -- most influential people, not women, influential people in Seattle. Well, Saturday night we met quite a few of those people. There were some of her students, had been students, or the parents of many students. I think... I'm not sure of this, but she thought that Bill Gates had at one time been her student, but he wasn't at the gathering on Saturday evening.

I was with Aki the night she died. I went to call on her and I was told that she was very low, and perhaps incoherent, irrational. She was in a hospital bed in her home, in the living room of her home. I don't think she recognized me at any time. I held her hand. She may have. She didn't try to speak. She was restless, but not apparently in pain. She was being -- there was a nurse in attendance -- she was being sedated -- I don't know, morphine or something -- by a nurse. And she died quietly. And I think probably, although she was beyond thinking herself, that she felt it was a release, it was time to go.

EG: She was someone very, very special to you through your whole life. The first time I met you, you were talking about her and were concerned about her health. At that time the problem was already underway.

FS: I don't hear you.

EG: Yeah, at the time that we first met, you talked about her and were concerned about her because her health was already failing. So she's an important part of your life for many, many, years.

[Interruption]

EG: Matt is interested in knowing, when you saw Aki on her last day, if you said anything to her at that time.

FS: No.

EG: No, 'cause she couldn't speak.

FS: All I remember saying, over and over again, "We love you, we love you."

EG: I know that's important to you. I know she's a big loss to you. I'm sorry. My condolences.

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[Interruption]

FS: ...touched me on the shoulder and said, "Do you know that you have a rip in the seat of your pants?" And she said, "I'm secretary to the pastor of the Friend's Church there, and if you stop in, I'll repair it for you." And then she said, "You wouldn't remember me, but I was your first school teacher."

EG: For heaven's sakes.

FS: Fifty, sixty years earlier. I remember I went to school on the day I was five years old. I wasn't supposed to go so soon, but I had an older brother who wouldn't go alone, so my mother had to send me along with him. And I remember that the teacher took me on her lap and read stories to me. And this was her, fifty, sixty years later.

EG: This happens to you all the time, that people from way back turn up again. That's amazing.

FS: It truly is. It's been said that if you sit long enough in Times Square, or O'Hare Airport, or any one place, someone you know will come by. I was walking down the corridors crowded with people at O'Hare in Chicago. Suddenly met a man that I had worked with in France twenty years earlier. On another time I boarded a BOAC plane in Calcutta, sat down beside a young man, he told me he was a member of a soccer, I think, team from Oxford, which was going out to Hong Kong to play some matches. I told him I'd just come from Oxford. We had a Quaker conference there during a vacation period for the students, and we were housed in student quarters, "digs" they call them. I told him I had just spent a week at Oxford, and he wanted to know where I lived. I told him the college. The rooms were not numbered, but the stairways were. I've forgotten which is the name of the college, but it had originally been a monastery. And the first floor was half underground, second floor up a flight of steps, and the third floor above. I told him the college, and he said, "What stair?" I told him, "Nine." "Which floor?" "Three." "By God," he said, "my digs!" I had spent a week in this man's room with his scout. The Oxford students, at least at this college, didn't have hot water, running water. And the students, for every two students usually there'd be an old man, a war veteran, whom they called a "scout," who would bring them a kettle of hot water every morning to shave. So I'd had his scout. It's also truly said that if any five people, total strangers to each other, get together, got together, there's about a 95 percent they'd find that they had a common ancestor or a related relative. And it's amazing how many people who are not Quakers say, "Oh, my grandmother was a Quaker," or "My aunt was a Quaker."

EG: I think one of the reasons so many people from long ago turn up back in your life is because you're living so long that you give them a chance to find you. Think that helps?

<Begin Segment 7>

EG: Okay. Let's go on with our chat. We want to talk about your work with Japanese Americans in the beginning, before the war even started, but you could see it coming. What do you remember from that time?

FS: Well, we had a house. I had built a house while I was teaching at the University in the Lake City area, and in Lake City at that time there was a mushroom-growing shed owned by a Japanese family. And my wife, while I was away from home a great deal, thought she might as well earn some money. She got a job in this mushroom-growing shed. I don't remember their names, but then not far from where we lived was a greenhouse belonging to the Nishitani family, and the old lady, grandmother, was very friendly. And I think I went there first just to see the collection of bonsai that her son, who owned the place, had some of them he had grown himself, developed, and others he had collected. And there was a daughter... there was a son who had married a haole, a white woman, American, and when they had to go to camp, she went with her husband. They were good friends of ours. Later the Nishitani boys operated the pharmaceutical greenhouse on the campus. I think they still do.

When the FBI was on my trail, they were interviewing all our neighbors, and there was a little canyon up from the lake and we lived on one side of it and on the other about a hundred, 200 yards across, and the neighbor on this side told an FBI man, said, "See that house over there? There are tunnels under that house, and the tunnels are full of Japs." Well, as I think I said, we had these four Japanese girls living with us and we had some... we were keeping for the duration, some of the possessions of Japanese friends. Nobu Suzuki, Dr. Suzuki's wife, had a beautiful bonsai -- If I we were in my room, I could show you a picture of it -- which we kept for her and returned to her after the end of the war.

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FS: And then, when we bombed Hiroshima in retaliation for Pearl Harbor -- revenge is never profitable. Pearl Harbor was strictly military operations. The planes came in from carriers 300 miles north of the island, flew over Honolulu, and didn't drop any bombs until Pearl Harbor, which is 6 or 7 miles east of downtown Honolulu. They sank seven ships which shouldn't have been there anyway, they should have been out on patrol. And they killed more than a thousand men. No women, no children, no civilians, no civilian, no private property, strictly military operation.

In retaliation, we killed with the Hiroshima bomb 30,000 children, and they're still dying from leukemia and other radiation. Three of the people I took to Hiroshima have since died as a result from leukemia, which is the commonest radiation disease. When we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, it was purely revenge. There were no Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima. There was no garrison there except a few guards in the castle where American prisoners of war were held. The Japanese army was not there. In fact, I think we killed more Americans, soldiers, than Japanese. There were eight or ten or a dozen prisoners of war in the dungeon of the castle which was destroyed. Harry Truman knew these people were there. I'm sure he did. I think the Pentagon knows their names. They were sacrifices, largely to see if the bomb would do what it was built to do. They spent years and millions of dollars developing an atom bomb, and they had two -- one called, "big boy," the other called "little boy." I don't know which one, but the Enola Gay, a bomber with a crew of five men flying out of Okinawa dropped one on Hiroshima. Hiroshima was not the designated target. It was not a military base. They were supposed to drop it perhaps on Nagoya, which was a port city and perhaps of military significance, but the designated target was socked in. So they had this bomb, they didn't want to take it away, and they dropped it on the nearest city, largely just to get it off their hands.

EG: A secondary target, a secondary target, if you can't get to the first.

FS: Then we had the other bomb, "little boy," three days later. Nagasaki had not even heard generally that Hiroshima had been bombed, and they were not prepared. Nagasaki bomb didn't do nearly so much damage, because while Hiroshima was on the flat delta of the Ota River with -- Hiroshima means three rivers -- the bomb wiped out everything in 10 mile radius and the noise was heard for a hundred miles all direction. But Nagasaki has an inland harbor with two or three ridges leading down to the waterfront, and the bomb fell between two ridges and so it wiped out only a fraction of the city. There was, in that destroyed fraction, a medical college, which was in session, and I don't know how many, three or 400 students, only two people survived. They were a couple of students or faculty who were in the x-ray film storage space in the basement.

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EG: Okay, let's go again. You said that the FBI had you under surveillance before the war.

FS: I have seventy-two pages of FBI indictment.

EG: You got your record? You got your record from the FBI?

FS: A great deal of it has been blotted out. They didn't want me to know who informed on me. But I have to hand it to them, I've talked with Naval Intelligence in Hawaii, FBI here, invariably they have been gentlemen, tolerant people. I don't like their occupation, but they have some good men. Did you know that Aki lectured the captain of a submarine in Seattle? During Seafair there was a naval, several naval vessels in the harbor. One was a submarine, and Aki was with others picketing this submarine, kayaks alongside, and they were driven away, I think actually by fire hoses. And then Norm Rice gave a dinner on the dock for the crew of this submarine, and he invited Aki. And so where she had been picketing a few hours earlier, she was sitting beside the captain of the submarine and lecturing him on peace. Of course, he maintained that his mission was a peaceful mission. He wasn't to make war, he was to prevent war and all this sort of thing. She didn't convince him at all, of course, of anything, but he listened to her. And she had the nerve to say, "We don't like you. We like you, but we don't like your business." Not many people would have done that.

EG: No, no.

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EG: Do you know why the FBI started keeping a record of you?

FS: I had a brother who didn't follow the family line, and he joined the Marines. They sent him out to China. In Shanghai, he was riding a motorcycle and a Chinese rickshaw man dashed in front of him. You know, there's always the devil following these Chinese people, and if they can go in front of a passing boat or something, it may cut off the devils. Anyway, this rickshaw man ran in front of him, and he hit him. And they both went through a plate glass window, and the Chinese man died. My brother was hurt. He always felt very bad about that. When he came back, came out, he was elected president or something of the Veterans of Foreign War group in the Seattle area. And at one of the meetings someone said, "You know, what we ought to do is to go out to that campus and run those yella bellied Jap lovers out of town." And my brother said, "Well, one of them happens to be my brother, and I want in on this." They didn't say anything more about it.

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FS: But I sponsored four or five Japanese -- not Japanese American -- Japanese girls at the University. When I was a senior in the College of Forestry, there was a required subject in physics. And when I went to the first class under a professor by the name of Osborn, who was really an SOB, very rough, a little Japanese girl, student, came in about five minutes late. She, it was the first class and she had had trouble finding the room so forth, and that fella, Osborn, bawled her out, laid her out so... rough, I got up and walked out and never went back.

So I couldn't graduate from the University of Washington. Instead I went to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University as the protege of a vice president of the Nash Motor Company, now the Chrysler, who I had met when I was a guide on Mt. Rainier -- C.B. Vores. C.B. Vores and his son, who became a US Congressman from California, walked up front with me on the glacier and we talked. And he discovered that I wasn't gonna' be able to graduate from the University of Washington, and so I, he learned I guess that I wanted to go to, instead to the New York City College of Forestry at Syracuse. He said, "Well, the Lord has given me more money than I deserve, and I am enjoying spending some of it helping other people." He said, "You bring Ruth," -- we were living near Paradise Inn at the time -- "You bring Ruth down to have dinner with I and my wife and two children tonight. We want to talk to you." And so he said, "I want to give you that year at Syracuse. You think it over, and come back before we leave in the morning and let me know." And Ruth and I talked it over and Ruth didn't like the idea of a direct handout. She said, "Well, let's accept it as a loan, on paper, IOU," and he said okay. And we used something over $2,000 of Vores' money to graduate from the New York State College of Forestry. I had it written on paper as a loan. And when in 1922 I graduated, I got a job on the park and I wrote Vores saying that we had some income now, and we'd like to start paying back that loan. He sent me the paper "canceled" and then a note saying, "Put it in the bank for your son."

Well, our son was getting 90 cents an hour on the campus while most of the students assistants were getting 35 cents an hour. He was getting 90 cents an hour helping Burt Farquharson, structural engineer, redesign the Tacoma Narrows bridge that had blown down. Ken built a replica of the bridge in the same ratio of stress to design, so forth, and put it in the wind tunnel and blew it down, blew it apart, and found out what was wrong with Galloping Gertie, the bridge. And the new bridge that Ken helped design has stood up ever since. The trouble with the bridge was that it was designed by Roebling -- who had built the Golden Gate Bridge and several other suspension bridges -- but they decided that the main member might better be a solid 8-foot steel wall, and that acted in only a 40-mile-an-hour wind, like a ribbon in the wind, you know how it goes. And that tore the bridge apart. So the new bridge has a open truss, wind blows through.

Well, Ken didn't need the money and so I have spent it helping other students, including three or four Japanese girls. One of them I'm very fond of, Satoshi Nagasawa, has two little children, a little girl and a little boy. The girl is named Yuki and the boy is named Floyd.

EG: Really? [Laughs]

FS: Foid in Japanese. He's probably the only Foid in all of Japan. I got a telephone call one day, and a little girl voice said, "Ojiisan, this is Yuki. How are you?" Ojiisan is "grandfather." And at three years old she had called me from Tokyo, and she speaks pretty good English now, and she's teaching Foid, little brother, English. I'll show you their pictures. And I hope, I think they will come.

Well, what brought this on? I've helped quite a number of Japanese students at the University, sponsored them. My son just returned a couple days from safari in South Africa. I guess I told you. And... I lost the trend. I don't remember just what I wanted to say.

<Begin Segment 12>

EG: We were wondering how you got identified as a person of note by the FBI. But you were active, helpful, with these students and also some faculty? Were there Japanese faculty at the University also?

FS: Yes.

EG: And then as the war was coming on, and they were beginning to talk about what to do with the Japanese Americans, and the notion of internment and so on, you had something to do with all of that as far as the university system was concerned, didn't you?

FS: One of these Japanese girls, woman, spent eighteen months at the University and acquired a very, almost perfect use of the English language. She went back to Japan. I suggested that she might like a job as a cabin attendant, stewardess, with Japanese airline. She worked for six or seven years. Oh, five or six years as stewardess, 747s, and then they put her on overseas flights. And she came through Seattle occasionally, I saw her. About once a week Satoshi'd send me a postcard from wherever they happened to be overnighting, might be Rio, might be Copenhagen, might be Moscow, wherever JAL flew. Last card I got had been bought in Rio. It was a picture of the Christ of the Andes. It had been addressed and dated "Mexico City," where they had stopped, routined... stop. And then it had been mailed from Vancouver, Canada, the next day. And she said, "I flew over Seattle last night and cried because I couldn't get off." Well, I think they'll visit me sometime this spring because her husband now has a business connection in Seattle, and little Yuki is quite a good sized girl now, quite fluent in English.

EG: Maybe she'll be another student for you to sponsor.

FS: What?

EG: Yuki will be another student for you to sponsor, maybe.

FS: Yeah.

<Begin Segment 13>

EG: You were before some committee, the Tolan Committee?

FS: What?

EG: You were before the Tolan Committee to testify?

FS: No.

EG: No?

FS: No. They visited me. My wife and I were sitting on the dock at Lahaina on the island of Maui one night when the boat from Hilo back to Honolulu couldn't dock because the water was too rough. And they were sitting off the harbor, off the dock -- there's no harbor there at Lahaina. And a man -- I'd met him... somewhere before -- sat down beside me, told me he was FBI, began asking questions. He knew all my friends, asked about Burt Farquharson, "How's he getting along," and this sort of thing. He knew just about all there was to know about me; very friendly, though. Finally, at the end of these seventy-two pages, there's a statement that, "This man, though misguided, is apparently sincere in his concern, and we do not recommend..." What's the word?

EG: Internment or indictment?

FS: "...recommend punishment," or whatever the, what's the word?

EG: Incarceration?

FS: Yes, we don't "recommend legal action against him." So I can make out enough of the blacked out areas, to know that they contain the names of people who had given evidence against me; and the evidence was, as my brother found out, I was a "yella bellied Jap lover." That sums it up.

EG: [Laughs] I didn't know there was a law against that.

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FS: Well, I've known -- did I show you the medal I have from Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan?

EG: Yeah, the other day you did, yes. We can do that again another time.

FS: And I have known the present Emperor, Akihito, since he was a boy, but I hadn't met

Michiko-san see until two or three years ago I was over there. I probably told you this before. I was the first American invited to take part in the August 6^th. And when Mayor... Watanabe, I think his name was... was introducing visitors from other areas, when he introduced me and I stood up, 60,000 other people stood up, 10 acres of people, shoulder to shoulder, during this ceremony.

And then during a dinner following that, someone said that chief of police wanted to see me -- I told you this surely -- but when we went to visit the emperor and empress -- I probably told you -- the chamberlain said, "You have a half hour. I'll come and knock on the door. You're not to use their first names, you're not to offer to shake hands, you're not to ask any questions," and so forth. Instead we spent more than two hours, stretched our half hour into two hours. And when we left, more or less habitually let's say, she gave me both her hands, and I kissed her hand. My daughter, who was with me, said she almost fell over. She saw that, but she squeezed my hand and I knew she knew these queer ways of the Americans who were always hugging and kissing each other. She's a darling, Michiko. Beautiful too. I showed you their pictures, didn't I?

EG: Uh-huh. Let's wind up for today. And we'll come back another day and pick up some more, if we may. Would you be willing to do some more?

FS: Oh, yes.

EG: Okay. Because we want to get more of the, of your work with, through internment, and then after internment. Okay? So we'll come back at a later date and pick up some of these things.