<Begin Segment 4>

EO: So do you remember, do you remember December 7th?

HU: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

EO: What do you remember? What were you doing? How did you hear about it?

HU: I was working in a Jewish market then, Westin and Hollywood Boulevard. And I hear about those thing. And, well, I knew the thing is coming because you read the paper all the time, you know what the tension getting built up between Japan and the United States. And a lot of people said they were surprised by that, I don't feel any surprise. I know those things coming.

EO: What was the reaction in the market?

HU: Well, you know, Jewish people was very much anti-Axis. They are. Because Germany was persecuting Jewish people, so they kind of feel very hostile to me. I'd be working in the Jewish market, so I didn't stay too long when the, after the war started. I probably worked about a month or two and then I quit. I quit and there's a rumor they're going to detain the Japanese in a camp or something, so I quit and then wait and see what's happen.

EO: Did the Jewish people actually say things to you? I mean, did you have a bad time there?

HU: Yeah, yeah. They tell me a lot of bad things. Japs in the Philippines, they rape the women, kill the children, this and that. You hear all those things. Kind of... I got nothing to do with them. I'm away from Japan so many years but yet they don't distinguish difference between Japanese in Japan and the United States. And the same time the government, I think they tried to build up the feeling against Japan. For instance, like January 26 or '7 in midnight, I hear a lot of noise outside. You know, some gunshot. So we had all the blinds down in the house, but I pulled up and take a look outside. You could see Long Beach, toward the ocean, the many searchlights flashing in the sky and you see the tracer bullet. You could see the tracer bullet go up in the sky, so do anti-aircraft gun is exploding in the sky. I couldn't see nothing but they going on for about eighteen minutes or so, and the next day, I see the Jap plane was flying over to Long Beach. But I couldn't see anything on the sky. Then about a week or ten days later, the navy blamed army, "They started shooting so we started shooting." They just, I think that's more like a propaganda for the government to, you know, knowingly say the, make the people aware we're in a war. Because the Pearl Harbor thing is just 3,000 miles away. So people don't feel any, well, it's started or anything. And then you see in the paper, Jap sub is sinking the lumber carrying the freight ship off L.A. and another ship claimed a near miss by a torpedo, they said. I couldn't see any submarine could come to the United States' shore. Impossible those days, without mother ship.

So all that government build the propaganda, but people believed those things. But a week or ten days later they said the sub was sunk because in January, heavy sea and they got an overload the lumber in the ship, so that's why they're flooded and they sunk. And heavy waves, so another ship reports a near miss and a torpedo, but I think that they imagined the things. And another thing, in Ventura, that's between Oxnard and Santa Barbara, they had a little bit of oil coming out there. And they had an oil storage tank right by the ocean there, and they said a Jap sub tried to knock that oil tank and they shoot at it but they missed that. And I couldn't believe that the Japanese sub will come to United States western... sure, that's impossible. And then that was 1978 or something, I've seen a small article in the San Jose Mercury, the farmer out there's, during the wartime, they claimed that Jap sub shoot up the oil tank, they didn't hit the tank and, "They shoot my farm," they said. That was the United States submarine doing propaganda. "I get paid from the government." That's what the farmer said, so I think that's true. Because the submarine aimed to the oil tank, right by, sure, they wouldn't miss that much. So I think what the government tried to do is build up people's hate or fighting spirit or whatever you call. Doing a lot of propaganda to stir up the people's feeling.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.