<Begin Segment 10>

FA: Jimmie, where were you at Pearl Harbor?

JO: Where was I on Pearl Harbor? I was in San Francisco publishing the magazine and working.

FA: So where were you the moment you heard about it?

JO: Oh, I didn't hear about it until that evening. Because that was a Sunday, and Sundays I drive out in the country and purchase cut flowers and stuff like that for shipping on Monday. And -- oh, actually, when I drove in, I noticed that the traffic was sort of light and I wondered about that, and when I drove into the city of San Francisco, there wasn't a soul on the street, and I thought that was unusual. And then just as I drove up to the shipping warehouse I heard, "Extras, extras, extras," and I opened the door and was standing there trying to catch the words and it was coming toward me but suddenly it veered off and went in a different direction and so I never got a chance to find out what the extra was about. And then a railway express man comes by that I had never seen before, and I asked him what the extra was about, and he says, "I'll go see," and took off. Then about two hours later, a group of railway express men came and I noticed several of them that I remembered from way back, were sort of familiar to me and when I asked them they told me war was declared.

FA: What was your reaction to that?

JO: Oh, naturally I was stunned. I expected that something, that a war would happen but I didn't expect it in the manner it did happen. So I didn't have the details, I just knew that the war had started, that's all.

FA: When did you realize that it would have an effect on you, on, an effect on all Japanese?

JO: Oh, immediately. If there was going to be war, it was going to affect us for sure.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1990, 2005 Frank Abe and Densho. All Rights Reserved.