<Begin Segment 7>

JK: Okay, Perry, I'm going to ask a few questions about your background, shift focus a little to you. When and where were you born?

PD: I was born in 1938, and I was born down the block here at a midwife's place here, right across the street, just about, from here.

JK: And how many siblings do you have?

PD: So I have two brothers and a sister. But my brother's a retired dentist, and my brother's a chemist and my sister was a nurse.

JK: So you were born in 1938, so you were around two or three years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Obviously too young to recollect the experience firsthand. Have your grandparents or parents told you about their reactions the moment that they heard of the bombing?

PD: No, they didn't say too much about it.

JK: And did you have any relatives living in Japan that your family was worried about at the beginning of the war?

PD: We had relatives, but they were like, maybe removed relatives, and I did have a chance to visit my relatives in Japan when I was, when I first made my first trip to Japan, I was, I must have been about twenty-seven years old, so that's quite a few years ago now, but, like, forty years ago now. So I did, I think I met, I think they were second cousins or something, so I visited Wakayama, and I remember riding on a steam rail train when I went the first trip to Japan, and now that I go to Japan, you ride a bullet train, that's more modern than anything in the United States. [Laughs] That thing just zips by so fast, you just hardly see the scenery.

JK: So did your family make contact with anyone back in Japan, either...

PD: It was my uncle that gave me the address, and I was able to visit, but after the first visit, it took a long time before I got, went back to Japan, so I never did really keep in contact. And my uncle that did keep in contact, he passed away quite early in life, or early for me in life. To him, but I guess he was in his sixties. So the connection between our family in Japan was not that close.

JK: Not that close during, or right after the bombing, up to the evacuation? Not a whole lot --

PD: Well, that was after -- before the bombing, they, they didn't really keep that close contact with the people of Japan, anyway, because there was no immediate... being a Nisei, all the brothers and sisters were in the United States, on both sides of my family, so there was no real connection between us in Japan for my family.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2004 Densho and The Japanese American Museum of San Jose. All Rights Reserved.