<Begin Segment 16>

TI: So Joe, in the second part, we're going to talk about December 7, 1941.

JU: Okay.

TI: You're in Denver.

JU: Right.

TI: And why don't you tell me how you found out about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

JU: I was cleaning the church after Sunday services and listening to the radio. Because when I cleaned the church, I put on the records. [Laughs]

TI: Or the radio you said, the radio?

JU: The radio in this case, yeah. The old Philco. Yeah, that's how I found out, and then I quickly went across the yard to Dad's, Mother and Dad's place, where they were, I mean, they were in the house and asked them what was going on. They said, "Well, we're apparently at war." And they were, I can say that we discussed this over dinner quite a bit, earlier, because she'd heard, I mean, Mother and Dad had both heard from their friends in Japan that Japan was building up airplanes, that was... I don't know if generally the public knew that, but they had it on letters from their friends from Japan, airplanes and the military was being bumped up. And so when they heard that, that was very sad for both of them.

TI: But when you said you had discussions around the dinner table about this, what did your parents say about this when they knew that Japan was building up...

JU: It was inevitable. Well, their discussions got pretty deep, as you probably would suspect. And what they were worried about is what they surmised the real problem was. And their view of it -- and I haven't heard it from too many sources and I didn't read it in too many sources -- their view was that Japan was interested in trade and couldn't get a decent deal with either Britain or the United States, and they were shorted on trade. So the causes of the war were economic strictly, according to my folks. And they were saying that the division of trade was not in Japan's favor, it was trying to rid, the U.S. and the English were trying to rid the Japanese of favorable status with themselves. And so that's the basic cause of the war.

TI: And so they could see it happening. They could see that the pressure in terms of the trade barriers, the difficulty in trade with Japan, that they said if this continues, the war is inevitable. And so when you went over there, and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they probably weren't that surprised, and maybe were disappointed, but they weren't surprised.

JU: They were, yeah, terribly disappointed because they thought that Japan could have been an excellent trading partner. And also in relationship to China and India, they needed an equal status with the U.S. and England and the French, and they couldn't get it.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.