Densho Digital Repository
Katsugo Miho Collection
Title: Katsugo Miho Interview I
Narrator: Katsugo Miho
Interviewers: Michiko Kodama Nishimoto (primary), Warren Nishimoto (secondary)
Location: Honolulu, Hawaii
Date: February 2, 2006
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1022-1-10

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But this is where, 1940, one day when I came back from working at Maui Pine, one year, 1940, after high school. And I saw that my mother was scared stiff. "What's wrong?" She tried to explain to me that there were some people in the house. And when I went back there, I saw these three, four... three, I think, Caucasian men walking around the living room in shoes. I said, "Hey, you guys, this is Japanese house, you guys don't... who are you?" "We're FBI." "Hey, my father's been investigated more than once, what do you want now?" But they wanted to find out if there was any additional stuff that should be declared. And this is 1940 that it occurred. So as I said it in my whatchacall, oral history, I was one of the few who weren't surprised December 7th happened. There were a lot of people who said they were completely surprised, I think that's a lot of malarkey. If they were AJAs, they should have known something was going on. Because in 1941, all of the gradual warnings and whatnot was happening now. You had the embargo imposed, and Manchurian war going on, I'm talking about two or three years before 1940 now. You had the embargo, you had the Manchurian Incident, and when we, the Japanese community people were asked to help the war cause in Japan now, and I remember a lot of Japanese families used to collect... cigarettes were sold in tinfoil, aluminum foil. And so the fad was to save those cigarette, make 'em into balls and send them to Japan. This happened.

More than that, there was, in November, my wife was in Japan visiting when the orders came out that any American citizen in Japan have to catch this boat November 28 or 29 if they wanted to leave Japan because thereafter, the American government would not be responsible if anything happened between Japan and U.S. And the orders came out that any Japanese people who wanted to go back to Japan, you catch a certain boat in Honolulu certain date. This happened in November, the last week or so of November.

Not only that, my brother was very closely involved with the so-called Emergency Service Committee, helping out. So he was on top of things that was going on. My brother Katsuaki lived with Hung Wai Ching when Hung Wai Ching was a member of the Emergency Service Committee, so they knew anything that was basically going on and how bad things were. Your auntie came home on the last ship from Japan. But my sisters, Fumiye went to Japan 1940 to teach at Doshisha University. And my other, Tsukiye, had been living there twenty-five years already, she had been married, she had kids. But Fumiye never thought that anything would happen. Said, "Oh, no, nothing's going to happen," so she refused to come back. But this pronouncement was made, and I remember distinctly that there was a newspaper article and headlines between Japan and the U.S., it was equivalent to the state of war. The diplomatic relationship, I think, had already been cut off.

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