<Begin Segment 3>

HM: Well, could you think back to when you heard of the news that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Do you remember that at all?

JK: Oh, you mean at Pearl Harbor?

HM: Yes.

JK: Oh, well, all I know is what they said on the news.

HM: What were you doing?

JK: Well, when we heard that, we were kind of flabbergasted, because we didn't know exactly what their plan was. But a little later, why, they said that Japan bombed United States, not United States but Pearl Harbor, and the next day or two, the United States declared war on Japan. That's how Japanese and American got into war.

HM: Did you have any deep personal feelings just, you know, coming back from Japan?

JK: Well it's kind of hard to leave Japan, because you know I have all the friends there, see. And I didn't know anybody over here, except my parents, and I barely remember my parents at all. So it's kind of hard for me at age of seventeen, eighteen, hard to leave Japan because we had to leave all the friends with, you know, separate from the friends and the family that brought me up.

HM: That would be hard. What went on in your household, do you remember, when you heard that your family, and how did your parents handle finding out that you had to leave the island?

JK: Well the only thing I remember was the FBI of some people that came to my house and took my dad away, see. Well, they were talking to Dad but I don't know what they were talking about because I wasn't that much of an English speaker at the time, but I remember that they took my dad to I think the Immigration Department first, and from there he was sent to Montana and Texas and New Mexico and then he stayed in New Mexico during the war until the war ends. He came back in 1944, I think that's spring of 1944, and he wasn't in any camp for that long either, one year, I think.

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