<Begin Segment 9>

MR: So you're a senior in high school and you start in 1941, things are looking pretty good, I suppose. All of a sudden, Pearl Harbor, what did you think when that happened?

HY: Oh, boy. My heart sank down to my toes. I says, "Oh, my god. What's going to happen?" You know, I'm thinking about me. "What's going to happen to me now? Gee, Japan attacked the United States. What are my friends going to think? What are the people of Hood River going to think? How's it going to affect me?" because I was a suffering boy in those days. I didn't think about my parents or anybody. I thought, "Hey, what's it going to do to me?" And so at that time when it did happen, I was out playing sandlot football with my friends in the neighborhood, and my father came running home and signaled me to come home. When he told us breathlessly what had happened, oh, god, now it's going to be terrible because, see, I already was aware that there was prejudice and discrimination in Hood River. Again, this is my personal perception. My siblings may tell you otherwise; oh, they never knew it because you will hear this from Issei that they had, no, everything was peachy dandy great. To me, it was not peachy dandy great, never was, because I always knew, and I always knew the reason. There was a reason, but I didn't, sometimes didn't know the reason why it was, but I knew it was there. So for me, I said, "Oh, man, this is going to be tough," and you know, it was tough.

MR: You were seventeen and the youngest, the second youngest, so where was everybody else at this point?

HY: Well, let's see, starting from the top, my oldest brother, they called him Chop, was married and expecting his first child. Min was working for the Japanese consulate in Chicago, that's the second brother. Michi, who's the third child, my oldest sister, was a senior at the University of Oregon. Roku, the fourth child... no, no. Wait a minute, let me back up. Let me back up. The first, very first child was Kay, and he died of suicide at the age of seventeen in 1931. Then came Ray "Chop" Tsuyoshi, and he was married and had a child on his way. Min was the third child, and he was in Chicago working for the consul. The fourth child was Yuki. Yuki was the sister I never knew. She was born in 1920, 1918 or something and died in 1922, so I never knew her. I was born in '24. Then Michi, the sister who's still living, she was a senior at the University of Oregon to graduate that year. Then Roku, which incidentally in Japanese can also mean "six," and he was the sixth child. He was a transfer student from the university of, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan. So that's where he was, University of Michigan. And then Shu who's immediately above me, he was a freshman at the University of Oregon. And then there's me, and I was a senior at the Hood River High School. And then there's Yuka who is a, was a sophomore at the Hood River High School. That's all the children.

MR: So everybody was pretty scattered?

HY: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The only two at home, really at home, was Yuka and me, yeah.

MR: Did your parents make any attempt to get everybody together or communicate at that point?

HY: No, because you have to understand, Margaret, immediately after Pearl Harbor was a massive roundup of the Issei, first generation, particularly of the men almost exclusively, and my father was picked up in that dragnet, not on Pearl Harbor day but on December 12th of, five days afterwards. And he was immediately taken to Multnomah County jail and subsequently transferred to a bunch of other places. So that immediately cut our family in half almost, and our mother as I say was not all that proficient. So it kind of devolved upon me to be the quasi father of the family because I knew English, could read and write it. But the problem is there was also a curfew law that came along later on. So my oldest Ray, Chop, who lived in Odell, which is about nine miles away, couldn't come in very frequently anymore because, you couldn't go more than five miles beyond your home after the curfew. So it devolved upon me to do a lot of these through instructions from our mother. I had to be the translator. But my younger sister Yuka also was very helpful too because she, of course, knew English, so we had to do a lot of the letter reading and reading the newspaper and so on. So my mother did the best she could. But see she's handicapped by not being, knowing, able to read and write English, and that makes a huge difference. So consequently, she had to depend on her dumb little kids to help her out, do the right thing, so it was hard.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.