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DT: And so what, do you remember the day that Pearl Harbor happened?

YK: You know, I don't remember exactly. But my father talked about it enough that I do have memories from what he told me and not from what I remember. But my sister went out to tell -- he was working out in the yard -- my sister went out to tell him that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor. And he said, in Japanese he replied, "No, something like that would never happen. That's... you must have heard it wrong," or, "That's not right. Japan would never do that." So my sister went back in the house, she heard more about it, went back out to tell my dad it really did happen. And so he came in the house and started talking on the phone to his friends and found out it was really true. And he felt that the people in the army, who didn't really know what a country, how great of a country America was, how large. And here was tiny Japan attacking America, and he could not believe that they would have done something like that. He felt the people in the navy knew what the rest of the world was like, but they had not made the decisions.

DT: I see, in the Japanese navy?

YK: Uh-huh, right.

DT: They had known, I see. So he was just shocked?

YK: Totally, totally shocked.

DT: Did he get a sense that there was gonna be some backlash because of that?

YK: Yes, yes. They felt like our lives were going to change. They didn't know how it would change, but they knew something would happen, right.

DT: And so you, so it happens and it's... Christmas passes and it's kind of this strange, maybe foreboding feeling that something was about to change for your family.

YK: That's right. And there were people who had shortwave radios and they would get the news from Japan. And I know the people in Japan felt very encouraged that the attack was so successful.

DT: Oh really?

YK: Yes.

DT: My goodness.

YK: So if you see any Japanese programs that show the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, they were doing their banzais.

DT: That's interesting because, you know, you would think there were so many people that migrated from Japan to the U.S. that they had relatives, and you just wonder what were those families feeling.

YK: That's right, that's right, yes. My father had a lot of family and my mother had all her family in Japan, and they were very concerned about what would happen to us.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.