<Begin Segment 2>

JA: Do you remember December 7, 1941? Do you remember December 7, 1941?

HT: Yes. By that time I was old enough to work around in the restaurant, and I was washing dishes in the back. That's where the kitchen was, in the back. And Smitty, he was one of our steady customers. He came running in and shouted something about, "We've been attacked in Hawaii." That's when I first heard about the war. But even when I heard about the attack, I never believed it, and my mom was there and she never believed anything about a war starting, attack by the Japanese, Japanese planes. No, we, we never believed it.

JA: Why was it hard to believe?

HT: Why is it hard to believe? I was attending Japanese school as a kid, and I also attended the Buddhist Church. Now the instructors in the Japanese school and the priests in the Buddhist Temple, they were all from Japan. When I was a kid I remember what they had told us. Now mind you, these people are from Japan. They were telling us that once born in the country, you are indebted to that country. No matter what happens, don't forget that you are a citizen of that country. Now, we've been told this over and over, this is the way we were taught. It's hard to believe that our teachers who are from that particular country telling us all of this, and they are attacking our shores? No, it is hard for us to believe, because what we were taught, we believed in. And to this very day, what I have been taught still is embedded in me.

[Interruption]

JA: How do you think your parents felt about this attack, having been born in the country that was now attacking the country they lived in?

HT: I think my parents... well, by then, my dad was, he passed away before the war. So where's my mother? She's the one who held the family together after my dad passed away, and I was trying to help her. Now, when my mother, she did not believe it. I guess what was in her mind, which she did not even dare let us know; she must have been real worried about the future of the family. But how she had felt, she's a woman... to her, the family came foremost. So the first thing that came to her mind, I guess, is about the family, the welfare of the family. I never asked her how she felt, but knowing Mom, I guess this was her foremost feeling about the family. I don't know.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.