<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Going back now again to that day, December 7, 1941, what about your family situation? What happened with your family after that day?

FF: Okay my... one thing that happened, my dad was -- the day after Pearl Harbor the FBI came to our house and turned it upside down looking for contraband, I guess, which we did not have. But they... I guess we did have, we had a short-wave radio, but the short-wave never worked anyway. But they took him away, and I, at least I personally then, didn't know where the heck he disappeared to. But a couple of days later, I found out that he was at the immigration center. So I did have an opportunity to go down and talk to him.

EG: Were you at home when the FBI came, and when the FBI took your dad away?

FF: Yeah, oh yeah. I was at home.

EG: What did they say when they were taking your dad away?

FF: I was, I was still kind of like a teenage kid then, so nobody consulted me about anything. But, so I don't really know exactly what they said. I just know that these guys came in and I distinctly remember them just tearing the house apart, throwing over the cushions, and going through the books and magazines and whatnot. Peeking into the innards of the radio and that kind of thing. Then after it was all over, I mean, just put him in a car and off he went.

EG: They didn't give a reason?

FF: No. Subsequently, just, well, maybe ten years ago, I got some files. I asked for some files from the archives on my dad. And there it gives some reasons why they took him in. There was a lot of allegations about him belonging to a pro-Japanese organization. He subscribed to a magazine which had the same name as a pro-Japanese organization, but which was totally unassociated. And they also accused him of being an official in the, in the Japanese gambling club. And God, I don't know, he was really the -- aside from really penny ante hana and stuff like that, I mean, he was really kind of anti-gambling, I think. Although he had his, his very good friends were associated with the gambling organization. But that was really the, probably the most traumatic of things that happened.

EG: Did you hear from him from that point on?

FF: I didn't hear from him at all, no.

EG: Not after that one visit.

FF: No. And we didn't... I guess we had some notice that he was coming back. But after we were evacuated, he came back to Minidoka.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.