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Q: How did you feel when you first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor?

GH: Well, disbelief. I... as a student I'm keeping up with front page, but you're not keeping up with the current events all that much. And when, on a Sunday morning, one of my... I had been attending a meeting, Quaker meeting, and as we came out, one of the fellows who lived right close, whose ears were glued on the radio, came down and said, "Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and it looks like there's gonna be war." And that was the first I heard. And then, of course, the newspapers, radios were literally screaming headlines about the, oh, the most serious words of dishonest attack and so on that you could find. And then report after report on acts of sabotage and espionage rumors that were coming out of Hawaii. So I thought, "Boy, this is an exaggeration," but I thought at least there'd be some. Subsequently, there were none. But that's, that's the screaming noise that came out, and the beginnings of various questions about what's gonna happen to our parents. Always, "What's gonna happen to the Isseis?" Because they were technically aliens, not eligible for naturalization, and then with war with Japan, they became "enemy aliens." So we felt that at least some kinds of restrictions will be imposed upon.

Q: How did your parents react to Pearl Harbor, and the rest of your family members?

GH: Well, with regret, of course, and hoping, hoping that things wouldn't get any worse. And wondering, everybody full of anxiety, now, do we, what do we do from here? Because from December and January on, should they continue preparing for next year's crop on the farm, or what else should they be doing and what's going to happen to them? Because things were pretty much up in the air. The prospect of their being confined somewhere was always there. And we tried to assure them that something may happen, since technically they're "enemy aliens," but don't worry, we're gonna be on hand to look after them and look after their homes and so on. Some of the more cynical Isseis said, "If anything happens to us, you'll be there with us. And we argued with them, "We're citizens. They can't do this to us." But they had the last laugh if they could have laughed.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.