<Begin Segment 3>

DG: Okay, so I'd like to start covering the war period. I guess we'll just go chronologically, or however it makes sense to tell the story of your parents and the Review.

MW: Actually, to backtrack just a little before Pearl Harbor, I think it was the summer before there was, we were neutral in the war. And being neutral means you're not giving aid to either side in the war. But we were repairing British ships in naval shipyards. And Bainbridge is situated so that any ship that goes into Bremerton Naval Shipyard has to pass within several hundred feet of Bainbridge Island. So when the Warspite, which had been involved in a very bloody battle in the Mediterranean, Crete, I think, they brought it into Bremerton for repairs. And the description my parents gave watching the ship go by, he said that you could still see blood and evidence of the conflict on the boat as it went by. Everybody on the island knew it was there, from people in Port Angeles, it's a big ship and it was coming into Puget Sound, and people knew. And it was a British ship, and there were British sailors who were going in for a shore leave, taking the Bremerton run into Seattle. So it was well-known in the Northwest that that was what was here. The navy requested that the news media impose a voluntary censorship on this, to not publish that. And the three Seattle papers, there was the Seattle Star and the P-I and the Times at that time, they all went along with that and didn't publish anything. And my folks thought that they had an obligation to their readers to report the news, and this was news. It also wasn't anything that was a secret. And I think part of it was that they also wanted to let maybe someone in Kansas who hadn't seen the ship go by at least have some paper recording that it happened. And so they published it. They said the Warspite was here, they sent copies of their article to both Associated Press and United Press International, the two wire services. AP ignored it but UPI picked it up and so did the Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine. And Time Magazine wrote an article about them, saying that this... they had a very interesting description of the Review which I can't quote exactly, but something like "a suburban weekly," which at that time Bainbridge wasn't a suburb of anything, it was just this little backwater. "Suburban weekly brightly edited by Seattleites," which also wasn't true, they were Bainbridge. But they said that they had published this and it was courageous of them to do that, and within a couple of weeks the navy published a pretty complete list of all the other British ships that were being repaired in naval shipyards around the nation. So they just felt that was, I think, sort of the hallmark of what they did. This is part of what we need to do, we need to be honest with our readers, and so they published it.

DG: Was that the first time that they had really taken that big jump?

MW: Pretty much, I think, yeah. I don't know of anything earlier than that. And that was, I think, in July of '41. And then when, in December, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, I think the paper came out on Thursday. Pearl Harbor was Sunday, they stayed up into Monday morning putting together a one-page war extra. To primarily... well, there were two purposes for it. One was to get civil defense information out to folks. "Don't drive at night with your lights on." "If you're at home after dusk, you have to cover your windows," that kind of thing. "If the church bells ring incessantly, that means something's coming and you have to be prepared, and don't ring the church bells except at a time like that," things like that that people needed to know. Who was in charge of what aspect of the civil defense. But they also, about half of that one page extra was devoted to the situation with the Japanese on the island who were... and maybe I've heard different estimates, but one is one-seventeenth of the population of the island, one-tenth of the student population, so a substantial number of islanders were, could trace their heritage to the country that had just bombed us. And they interviewed some of the elders in the community, they interviewed some of the Issei, and I think also some of the younger Nisei were included in that, but mostly to talk with, Mr. Koura was interviewed, I recall. And saying that, "We are one hundred percent American and loyal, and we want to do whatever we can to help in the war effort." And they also had an editorial which was double column and ran the whole length of the left side of the page saying, "Let's be reasonable. We've got folks here in our community who look like the enemy, but we know they're our neighbors and let's not, let's just go on as we have and recognize our neighbors are not the ones who bombed us." And that actually was pretty similar to a lot of other newspapers. There were editorials like that all around the Puget Sound area and even some of the California papers, saying, "Let's be reasonable."

There was a pretty well-organized, very quiet campaign in the next two months. Some politicians, some of the traditional anti-Asian folks from California mostly, but also here, the American Legion, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, that was a very racist group, joined together with, for whatever reason, the Secretary of the Navy and certain officers in the army who seemed to be intent on removing the Japanese from the West Coast. The FBI had done extensive research over the last few years, as had the Justice Department. There were specific reports from Hawaii and other places that Roosevelt had saying, "There's no danger from this group. We have identified people who might have ties, might" -- and it's a short list, "and we can take care of them." And they did that in December. They rounded up a bunch of the first generation Japanese in December, but by February, by mid-February, the... people talk about war hysteria, but the war hysteria was whipped up by politicians and certain columnists, Henry McClemore, Westbrook Pegler, even Walter Lippman joined in, and by mid-February, the popular opinion had shifted and almost every newspaper who had come out saying, "Let's be reasonable," in December, by February was saying, "Let's move 'em out, get 'em out of the coast." And so it's a pretty amazing story, I think.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2007 Densho. All Rights Reserved.