Densho Digital Archive - Chester Tanaka Interview (denshovh-tchester-01-0002)

<Begin Segment 2>

I: December 7, 1941, what was the reaction in St. Louis? What was your reaction and the city's reaction, do you remember?

CT: I was just stunned when I heard the news. I said, "How could they do this? Don't they understand that they have very little materiel, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense how they could even consider going to war against the U.S. Anyway, I was just stunned. The city, the area, the neighborhood where I grew up, the school and so forth, it was a little strange, but essentially they were supportive. There was not too much they could do. Many of them understood my situation, I mean, not mine, but the family situation, and that the Germans and the Italians had undergone similar, a relative situation that we were placed in in World War I when the war began over there, and the Kaiser was hung in effigy and Germans and Italians were singled out and chased around and so forth, or at least Germans anyway. So there was quite a bit of understanding, quite a bit of understanding from the neighborhood and from the people. It was quiet, there was no rock throwing or vituperation or yelling or anything of that nature.

[Interruption]

CT: -- and we were left alone, and we stayed in St. Louis. We were not put into relocation centers because that only applied to Japanese Americans or Japanese American families that were in military zones. We were not in such a zone.

I: What was your reaction when you heard that the Japanese families were being evacuated on the West Coast? Did you have any empathy, did you feel for them?

CT: Yes, we thought that the next move would be to move the families inland, out to the relocation centers. We were stunned, we just didn't understand it. I had just finished, or about to finish law school, and I couldn't comprehend how they could move Japanese citizens, Japanese American citizens. They might do this to Japanese who were not citizens, but not to Japanese Americans who were citizens. This was incomprehensible to me. I was trying to get more information and detail, but in the Midwest, there was not too much information of this type coming through from the West Coast. All the news was, of course, in the newspapers, and they were all the headline type, and of the war problems and so forth, and they were not the underlying legal or other aspects. This was not delved into too much by the papers.