<Begin Segment 5>

MH: Pearl Harbor, where were you, what were you doing?

EF: We were out in the field harvesting when this all happened. Naturally, we didn't know about it until we came in for lunch at noon. It was a tough day for the Nisei, I thought really tough for the Nisei, but maybe the Issei too, but I know it was a tough day for the Nisei. I never thought anything like this would happen. But we still were in school, so we had to go to school the next day. It was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. People, hey, it was still like normal in fact. They didn't make no big that we were Japanese. They had no problem, never took it out on us like we were the enemy, so life went on like normal. It was great. These people were, we had no problems. We had no problems. That's awful hard to say, but we didn't have no problems, and we were the graduating class too. And like I said, we had quite a few in our class, so it should have made a difference, but it didn't.

MH: What happened with the farm, your dad, during this period?

EF: My dad was still very active other than being a first generation Nisei was still the boss. He was still the boss. He called all the shots, which was fine with us. You couldn't have found a better person to call the shots. Well, we owned the farm. We owned the farm. That was the one thing that we owned the farm. And since we had to evacuate, we had to get somebody to run the farm because we had strawberries on there and we had spinach on there. Items were just about ready to harvest when they left, so we found a family that worked for us before that said they'll take care of the farm, those crops. But we had the other land, the open land that we were concerned about. So the Multnomah County farm was our neighbor next door, so my dad kind of felt, hey, maybe we'll see if they're interested in the land while we're gone like sharecropping. So he made those arrangements, but we had a little problem with that. When we returned, they didn't want to give that ground up. My father, but they didn't own the ground. So we had a little court hassle for about three months. But one Sunday morning, my father says, "Start up the tractor because we're going to disk all this grain up." There's a lot of grain being raised, and that was the answer to the whole situation, problem. And the funny thing about it was the farm manager was on his horse on the other side of the fence when this all took place, so he got a bird's eye view of this scene that was made, and that was the end of the problem.

MH: Let's go back. Your father couldn't go to the market anymore and you were, what, just eighteen years old at the time. You had a brother Kaz and where was Kaz?

EF: He was in the army. He was drafted already.

MH: So what was your role at that time?

EF: I was the next old, I was the oldest son, so I had to do things like drive the truck up to Seattle and Tacoma. And we had a curfew where we had to be back, couldn't leave until eight o'clock in the morning and had to be back home at eight o'clock at night, so we had to make sure we could make that run up there and back within that twelve hours. So I was still going to high school at that time. So at that time when things were busy, we made two trips a week, and I had to drive the truck because my father was an alien. He was not allowed to, he was not allowed to drive or be on the road.

MH: What were the trips for?

EF: We had produce we were selling. We had farm products that we had, somebody had ordered up in Seattle and Tacoma that we were taking care of, so we had to kind of continue to do it till we ran out. So that lasted at least two months, so I missed a few days of school, but everything went all right. I graduated so I can't complain. And I'd tell my teacher, "Hey, I've got to go back to work on the farm." They never, they never ever said, "No, you got to stay in the class." They felt that was more important.

MH: Do you think your dad worried?

EF: Oh, my dad worried. My dad worried from the time I left till the time I got home. Yeah, he worried, and I don't blame him, send some kid out there on the road with a truck that he didn't know where he was going, but I managed it.

MH: You mentioned you went past Fort Lewis etcetera. Was that kind of scary?

EF: Yeah, that was because it was all, they had armed guards out on, right on the road. That was the old days back on the old highways, so it wasn't I-5 or any of those. I forgot what they call it, Highway 90 maybe or something like that, two lane. And wartime, you had to drive with the parking lights on. You couldn't use your headlights during the night although there wasn't that much night driving because I had to be home by eight o'clock. But a lot of times taking off at eight o'clock in the morning, we had to have our lights on, but you can only use your parking lights.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.