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KM: Then I got assigned to standing guard at Farrington High School. Farrington High School had been immediately converted into a hospital and so they needed some guards, you're standing guard at the hospital. So I don't know how long I was standing guard at Farrington High School. Then I was assigned to a squad that guarded the electrical plant on Liliha and School Street. And a very unusual incident happened while I was guarding. Many things happened to the Hawaii Territorial Guard. One of which was that the first few nights patrolling, the downtown patrollers, they shot at each other. They actually shot at each other, fortunately, nobody got hurt. But everybody was so excited and unwittingly, without proper notification, proper identification, they shot at each other, different groups shot at each other. Or like in Kalihi, they heard a kind of rattling noise and they fired the gun and the next morning they found they had shot a cow out at the water pump station or something in Kalihi.

And all kinds of different... in my case, it was relatively quiet, nothing unusual happened. Except when I was guarding in Liliha, we would stand outside, right on the street, right on the sidewalk, and we'd be standing, two of us would be standing guard, and then the traffic would go by. But  early in the mornings, early in the morning when it's still dark, a lot of the defense workers had to go on School Street to catch the bus at Liliha. They had already heard all these rumors about the trigger-happy guards, and so these people going to work when it's still dark, what they did do was... actually, I don't know if we told them, but they would make all kinds of noise that they're coming across to let us know that they're coming. [Laughs] Bang the sidewalk, the fence or whatever to let us know they were coming.

I remember that one day, which was early, the first week, no, must have been the second or third week. While I was standing guard, I saw an acquaintance of mine from Maui. And I was wondering, how come... oh, his name was Mr. Shigenaga. He saw me and he came right up to me and he said, "Oh, Miho-san," he's spoke, basically, Japanese, and I could barely converse, but, "Oh, how you been?" He told me, "Your father got picked up, you know." I said, "What do you mean?" He told me about my father being picked up. He's the one that I got the word from. I said, "What you doing here? Aren't you on Maui?" "Yeah, I was on Maui, but I just happened to be in Honolulu when the war broke out," so he was still in Honolulu. And so we exchanged pleasantries, and that was it. I didn't think anything about it.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2021 Densho. All Rights Reserved.