Densho Digital Archive - M. Jack Takayanagi - Mary Takayanagi Interview (denshovh-tmjack

<Begin Segment 7>

KL: And I know you had graduated from high school already by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, but were you still at University High?

MT: No, I had graduated in '41, so I started school at Chapman, college at Chapman College.

KL: Oh, okay.

MT: And it now has a campus in Whittier, but it was on Vermont Avenue, and so my dad got me a little car and was driving to go to school. I guess it was fifteen miles into the city.

KL: What are your recollections of news of the attack?

MT: We were, we had gone as a family to the Japanese Christian church. We were all just a little bit older then, and so we went as a family and we were buying gasoline, and the attendant said that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. So it was quite a shock, and we drove home. Then things happened, the talk of evacuating Japanese and Japanese Americans, quite quickly developed before we knew it. We were told we'd have so many days before we would be sent.

KL: How did you... did you see that on signs, or how did you learn that news?

MT: It was through that... what was the name of the evacuation order?

KL: The 9066 order?

MT: Yes.

MJT: Executive Order 9066.

KL: How did you learn of the executive order?

MJT: Learned on by, being posted on telephone poles. We had no television, radio was something else at that time. They weren't making announcements, so what we saw was these posters got posted on telephone poles around your residence, throughout your residence. And that, there were copies of that available out, that shows... that's generally, and by word of mouth, that the President had signed an executive order.

MT: At that time I think the order was out that all homes had to darken your windows, I think that had already taken place for everybody, and so there was fear that there could be warfare on the United States. So we, I can remember putting the plastic up and darkening the rooms at night.

MJT: See, the thing that the war did was because the Japanese, that's my folks, were not granted citizenship rights, they couldn't become citizens. Because they were denied citizenship, they could not own property, and that also meant that they couldn't vote. So all these liberties that were rights of others that came to this country and were given naturalization privileges were denied to my parents. And so when the war came, my mother and father with hundreds of others became enemies. They were not aliens, they became "alien enemies" just by virtue of the act in Pearl Harbor.

[Interruption]

MJT: You asked for, I was attending Sacramento junior college at the time, December of '41. And I was a houseboy for our room and board, for a junior senator called Mr. Roberts. And he had two sons, one was named Jack, so they couldn't have two Jacks in one house, and so they called me Jay. And Jack was the younger of the two boys in the house. And on this morning, which was a Sunday, I had gone to church. And I came back home because I had duties to do on the weekends, and as the houseboy I did... I won't go into that, washing clothes and stuff like that, cleaning house. But as I was doing that, the young Jack of the Roberts family came running into the house shouting, "Jay, Jay, did you hear that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor?" Well, I hadn't heard it, I didn't have the radio on. So immediately I turned the radio on, and what he had said was true as far as the announcement came over the radio. Immediately my thoughts were for my parents, because I considered myself an American citizen by nature of birth. My folks were denied that right, so they were automatically now the enemies. So what would that mean for them and their future, or the immediate future? And so I drove home in my car, my Green Hornet, and I went up to Central Valley. On the way up, there's the Grapevine, which you may know, is the entryway into L.A. Valley, they had that, the military was out and stopping all cars. That's where he stopped me and went through my whole car before they would let me pass through. So after I passed that so-called test, I went home and the agreement was that I'd come home, I wouldn't go back to Sacramento, but I would come home, which I did, and was about ready to enroll at Chapman College.

KL: I have one more question about... did you talk to Senator Roberts at all?

MJT: About this?

KL: Yeah. Did he have a response that you know of?

MJT: No, I don't remember him devoting any opinions, you know, that I can remember. I think he was a little sympathetic in that he allowed me to go home. I knew that I had to get home and see how this was affecting my folks.

KL: Were there other cars that were searched?

MJT: There were other cars that were stopped along the highway, yes.

KL: Was your treatment the same as other drivers?

MJT: About as far as I could understand, it was, yes. Although once they saw that I was Asian, that may have changed their attitude a little bit. It was not evident that any of them enforced, any kind of force. They told me to get out of the car, and they searched the car.

KL: Do you think... both of your parents had been in this country for a while by that time. Do you think they would have pursued citizenship if it would have been open to them?

MJT: Oh, yes. When that was granted in 1952, my father was one of the first that went down and became a citizen, just on the announcement. He went right down and became a citizen.