Densho Digital Archive
Watsonville - Santa Cruz JACL Collection
Title: Mas Hashimoto Interview
Narrator: Mas Hashimoto
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: Watsonville, California
Date: July 30, 2008
Densho ID: denshovh-hmas-01-0015

<Begin Segment 15>

TI: Any other... well, let's keep going. So let's, so within a couple months, people started getting word that they're gonna have to leave Watsonville.

MH: Right.

TI: So what did your family do?

MH: Our family had to start packing like, like everyone else. But everybody's making decisions, and you don't know what, which decision is going to be the right decision. We boarded up the house. We had something to come back to, a lot of other people didn't. Many of the farmers, they were tenant farmers, they didn't own the house. So they didn't lose something they didn't have, so to speak. But when, after the war is over, they're gonna have difficulty finding a place to stay.

TI: And so the house, you say, was yours. I mean, back then, with the alien land laws, Isseis couldn't own land. So whose, whose name was used?

MH: Hiroshi, firstborn.

TI: Okay, so your older brother.

MH: Everything was, all the land and such were always in Hiroshi's name.

TI: Okay, okay. So that, that's why you would own the property. So pretty soon you are asked to assemble to be removed. Talk about that.

MH: Well, I don't know exactly how we got to the Veterans Memorial Building where we were to, from which we were to evacuate. And I, we were given numbers, and I remember my number, I looked it up. It's 12524, that's for the family, 12524-D, I'm the letter D. I looked it up on the national registry thing, archives, and I couldn't find it at first. I had to check under my mother's name because they misspelled my name. They didn't say Masaru, they said something else. And so, but anyway, I found, I found mine. We left by bus to go to the Salinas Assembly Center. But I have -- there's an interesting story that I, unique to Watsonville, and that was the story of Ben Torigoe. Ben Torigoe had a watch repair shop, but he expanded it to include -- he was one of those guys that, self-educated. He just loved to take things apart, see what makes it work, and put it back together again. But he could do watches, he later did it with bicycles, then he sold fishing tackle and license, then he had guns, ammunition, so he had a little sporting goods store a block away from the police station. Well, on, on the day after the attack, he goes to the police station, to the police chief, Peter Graves, "I've got these guns and ammunition, what do you want me to do with them?" "Oh, don't worry about it, Ben." He's been in business for thirty years. Well, the next day, the federal agents raided the place, and the headlines in the newspapers were, "Cache of ammunition in a store," well, it was a sporting goods store. And the Torigoes had a tough time talking about it and such. So finally, when we did our reenactment, I asked him if we could do the story. At first they said, "No," and then I wrote the script, and they looked at it and they said, "Well, that's the way it happened, so let's get the story out."

TI: So what did happen? So after they were raided by the FBI, then they were arrested for that?

MH: He was arrested.

TI: And the police chief wasn't able to explain to the federal agents that...

MH: Not that I know of, not that I know of. I guess they kind of, federal authorities kind of pushed the police chief aside, maybe he was suspect then, being a sympathizer. But we had friends, we had friends.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright ©2008 Densho and the Watsonville - Santa Cruz JACL. All Rights Reserved.