Densho Digital Archive - Rose Tanaka Interview (denshovh-trose

<Begin Segment 13>

AL: Before we go into the camp stuff, I just wanted... if it's okay, to ask you a couple questions a little further back.

RT: Yes.

AL: And one was, you talked about your friend Maxine being Italian, and that you were close and that you did everything together. How did Pearl Harbor and the war affect your friendship, or did it?

RT: No, I did not, I could not tell that it made any difference in our relationship. You must understand, after all, that Italians were part of the Axis powers, and California was, had a large Italian population. I don't know whether the Italians were targeted much. I know that we were targeted because we were on the Pacific coast, which was just closer to Japan. And I have heard since that some Italians and Germans were questioned and were investigated. Maxine's family, the Genardini, was very popular, were a very prominent part of that community.

AL: Can you spell her last name?

RT: Genardini, G-E-N-A-R-D-I-N-I, Genardini. And her uncle was the constable of the town. Her father drove a truck that carried, well it was more like, just carried stuff up and down, and her mother was postmistress of the town. So they were, well, I mean, in a small town, everybody is prominent. There are all kinds of jobs to be done. The teacher, my teacher, Mrs. Minetti, was Italian. Her husband was head of the library, was head of the library there. So all these people had responsible jobs, and they have known us all their lives. And their attitudes remained very friendly with us, so we did not feel the sting of discrimination from them.

AL: Did you look at them at all, though, and say, "Wait a minute, we're at war with Italy and with Japan. Why do I have to go and not Maxine?"

RT: No, I didn't question that. I realized that there was a much stronger part on the part of the U.S. government, it was in the press and all that, that the Japanese were the bad guys, that the emperor and the military there were the ones not to be trusted. And this apparently is what the U.S. government parlayed to all their people in this country, that we had inherited the Japanese mentality, regardless of our birth, our natural birth rights here, that we had it in our blood. And this is what Franklin Roosevelt mentioned, that we were "unassimilable" is how he put it. And, of course, we had separate because of the way we were treated, and because of the way the Japanese did not want us to intermix, have intermarriages. And so it worked for both sides, both from the United States side and from the Japanese side, that we had not mixed, there were very few cases of mixed marriages here.

AL: It was interesting, I think it was DeWitt who said, in regard to Japanese, "A viper is still a viper no matter where it's hatched."

RT: Oh, yes, the "Yellow Peril."

AL: Yeah. Well, and you had the Hearst papers, I mean, your next-door neighbor down there, Mr. Hearst. Was he still alive during the war?

RT: He was alive, yes. He was living a great life up there at Hearst Castle. He had Hollywood girlfriends who came up, and they had big parties there. And when they had big parties, they needed help, and so the high school gals were hired to go and wait tables and do work at the Hearst Castle to entertain his Hollywood friends.

AL: Did you ever do that?

RT: No, I wasn't old enough. [Laughs] Some of the older ones, the seniors said they worked at the Hearst Castle for a party or something.