Densho Digital Archive - John Young Interview (denshovh-yjohn-01-0008)

<Begin Segment 8>

RM: When you were in high school in junior high, I guess 1937, the war between Japan and China started. Do you remember hearing about that?

JY: Oh, yes, we heard a lot about that.

RM: What were the conversations like?

JY: In fact, we had a big fight down near the city hall there, Hall of Justice, Japanese and Chinese. But it was people that we knew, and we couldn't do anything really. But most of the troublemakers were from high school, they started it. And especially the China-born, not the American-born Chinese or Japanese. So it was the Chinese and Japanese-born that started it. We were more like bystanders.

RM: What kind of tensions, did you feel tensions among your friends?

JY: No, in fact, I had a lot of Japanese friends. In fact, when I went to Manzanar, this guy that went across the fence to get a ball got shot by the guards. Yeah, they were saying that in fact, my daughter wrote something about that. The guards were there to protect the Japanese, so my daughter said, "Then why are the guns facing the Japanese instead of outside, protecting them?" Yeah, that was a Japanese captain that came in the camp, and the soldier wouldn't salute him. And he was in an American uniform. And they came in the camp to recruit the Japanese, they said, "Gee, they put us in camp, why are they coming in here trying to recruit us?" You've heard of the 442nd?

RM: Yeah, yeah.

JY: They were the highly decorated Japanese group.

RM: What did your parents think about Japan's aggression towards China?

JY: Well, really, there wasn't much influence on that, because they were here so long, they knew some Japanese and all that. I think we were friends with them, so they remained friends. My mother-in-law had a hotel, she leased the property in the hotel, and had twenty rooms on Hewitt and First Street, she lost all that when she went to camp. But the Japanese and the Asians were pretty ambitious people, so they came back and recovered. In fact, her family, my wife's family, went back and worked for Bird's Eye, frozen department in New Jersey, they stayed there 'til 1950 after they left camp, after the war was over. And my brother-in-law, Roy, was about a year younger than I was. He never drove in his life, he bought a car and brought the whole family back and lived with us.

RM: Well, let's start talking, I want to open it up for Kristen to ask some questions about prewar, pre-Pearl Harbor.

KL: I just have one. You said that your dad was kind of unusual in that he came to the U.S. and he never returned to China. Do you know why he decided to do that?

RM: I guess he had no connection with his family and all that. I doubt if he ever wrote back to China, to his family, because he's been here so long already. And they're probably, most of them are dead anyway. He was one of the youngest, too. Yeah, never went back. Most Chinese would go back, show how successful they are and things like that.