Densho Digital Archive - Joe Seto Interview (denshovh-sjoe

<Begin Segment 4>

EB: So at the time of Pearl Harbor I guess you were a senior in high school. Can you tell me more about how you, tell me about how you heard about Pearl Harbor and how that affected your family and your life in school and neighborhood, perhaps?

JS: I remember we returned from church about noontime, and the neighborhood boys came over and said, oh, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. So then we only had a radio, and we listened to it, and the family was rather subdued, I think. We didn't go anyplace on that day. So to me, it was quite a shock. I think in retrospect, we knew that it was imminent anyway, because I remember one of the neighbors, he had some connection with law enforcement, although he wasn't gainfully employed, but he was more or less a political appointee. And one of the physicians in the neighborhood was the county coroner, and I know he worked at the... well, this person who was the county coroner, which was not for many years. Anyway, which was common that I was over at his house, and he asked me, "Do you know that we're going to have war with Japan?" I said, "No." And he said, "You know that you're going to be placed in concentration camps?" I said, "No." And he asked me, he says, "What would you do? Would you join the army?" I said, "If I have to, I will." So that was one of the experiences I had before the war started.

EB: What was the reaction of your neighborhood, and did any prejudice emerge within your neighborhood shortly after Pearl Harbor?

JS: No, not at all. Only after we had left Tacoma, our neighbors told us about this one family who stated that they wished we never came back. It so happens this family was of German extraction. And when my parents returned to the family home, the ladies of that family were not, they kind of avoided us. If they saw us walking down the street, they'd walk across the street and avoid seeing us. But the man, he's the one that was this part-time law enforcement, he tried to talk to us.

EB: Did this have any effect on your father's job?

JS: No. My father, he was in the produce business all his life until World War II. And it was not possible to go back into business, so he worked as a gardener at the Tacoma General Hospital, one of the two main hospitals in Tacoma. And he did that until he retired.

EB: Were you aware of any restrictions imposed upon Japanese Americans like curfew or travel?

JS: Oh, yes, absolutely.

EB: How did that impact you, and how did you feel about it?

JS: Well, I couldn't quite understand it, why we were restricted. We couldn't leave the house after 8 p.m. at night, and couldn't travel more than five miles away. And so we lost this sense of freedom. So the neighborhood boys would come over.

EB: And how did this affect your siblings or your parents?

JS: Well, it affected my father because he used to drive to Seattle, which is thirty miles away, pick up some produce and then bring it back to Tacoma, because, of course, he couldn't do that. But there were two things, because of curfew and any other things because of the prejudice with the, his customers, because many of them wouldn't purchase things from him anymore.

EB: What did your mother and father do with any keepsakes or mementos from Japan? Were the items burned or buried or sold?

JS: They really didn't have things that I know of, they didn't do anything about it, they just stored 'em. Because all of our personal belongings were stored at the church.

EB: Was your house ever searched by the FBI?

JS: No, no.

EB: Okay.