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JA: How old were you in December '41?

SE: I was eighteen. I had finished high school in January and I was helping my mother take care of a small grocery store which she had purchased just a year before.

JA: If there's anybody out there who doesn't know, tell us what happened on December 7, '41.

SE: Well, on December 7th, around 8 o'clock in the morning, Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor, which is in Hawaii, and destroyed a large number of the U.S. naval ships. And we heard about it, I think it was around noontime. I was listening to a disc jockey called Al Jarvis. He was playing all the popular music of the day, and an announcer interrupted the program to say that Japanese airplanes had dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor. Most of us didn't know where Pearl Harbor was, you know, and when I first heard it, my mother was making lunch next door at our rented house and I was watching the grocery store, it was a Sunday. And I went over there and said, you know, "They said on the news, on the radio that Japanese airplanes had bombed the United States' Hawaiian islands." "Oh," she said, "that's probably not true." She said, "They're always making headlines, wanting to sell newspapers. I don't see how Japan could do that." But as the day wore on, we heard more and more people coming into the store to tell us that the FBI, the army and navy had gone into Little Tokyo and picked up the leaders and took them away. That the L.A. Police Department had put up barricades so people wouldn't come driving by to look at what was happening. And my brothers, who had the day off from their work, came, came home to tell us that things were a mess in Little Tokyo, that the war had really started, and I guess it was hard for us to believe that it was happening.

JA: What did your mother think about that, coming from the country?

SE: Well, she kept saying that Japan wouldn't do that. She said, "America's too far for them to come all the way to Hawaii," and, but she was worried. She said, "Well, maybe they're going to come and get me, too, so I better get ready." And some of our neighbors, the women who were active in the Women's Federation, packed -- actually packed a suitcase to wait, although they weren't taken; most of the men were taken. My mother waited and they never came, you know, for her, but she was not that active in the community, so... but by the time nightfall came, almost all of the leaders were arrested and gone. And Monday morning the Japanese branch banks in Little Tokyo were closed and people couldn't do any business, they couldn't open their stores because most of the bank accounts were in the names of the fathers and there was no way that they could continue business.

JA: How did -- after that time -- how did the Pearl Harbor change the way that Caucasian Americans related to you, and your family and your friends?

SE: Well, we were in an area which was east of Little Tokyo, mostly Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and north of us the Chinese who were living around Chinatown. Our teachers were very sympathetic and the papers were fairly sympathetic for a while. We didn't go out very much, you know like going to the movies or anything because we were afraid to get on the buses and the cars, the streetcars, and... but we didn't have too much anti-Japanese feelings aimed to us. We had people in the business around us who were coming to our, my little, my mother's store and buying things and they were all very sympathetic. But as time went on, the different groups, Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, and American Legion, all started to campaign to get the Japanese out of California, especially California and Oregon and Washington, and I guess by February it was pretty evident that they wanted us out of there. The Congress formed a select committee to come out and do some public hearings, and basically they wanted to do it for the aliens because they were now considered "enemy aliens," you know, Italian, German, and Japanese on the West Coast, and so they were going to have public hearings as to what to do with these people. And it eventually ended up that the recommendation was that all of us be removed from the West Coast, and originally it included Italians and Germans. But by the time that President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19th, it was exclusively persons of Japanese ancestry.

JA: Prior to that, had your home been subject to any searches or seizures?

SE: Not our house, but our neighbors' houses were. The FBI just came in and looked through everything, especially if they were going to take the male head of household away. I had a friend whose brother was a truck driver and he was supposed to take different crates of vegetables to different areas, and he had a map with a destination marked from Los Angeles to San Diego, and the FBI found that map and they questioned him about what he was doing in all these places. And they said there are certain areas where there are strategic naval bases and army bases and they thought he was going after those places. He said, "No, I'm just delivering the fruit and vegetables," but he couldn't, he couldn't convince them.

JA: What other things were they looking for?

SE: I think they were looking for spies and people who might be going to these areas to maybe blow up the place or take pictures or whatever, which none of us were ever doing.

JA: And I guess they were looking for certain artifacts that they thought would be associated with that.

SE: Right, yeah. And then of course, I'm not sure where it came from, maybe the government, U.S. government, or from L.A., we had to turn in all our flashlights and radios, shortwave, guns, knives, whatever, that they thought was contraband.

JA: Cameras.

SE: But we never got them back.

JA: Say that again?

SE: We never got those back.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.