Densho Digital Archive - George Nakata Interview (denshovh-ngeorge

<Begin Segment 10>

MH: Where were you or can you remember where you were on December the 7th? What were you doing? Can you remember that at all when the war started?

GN: I don't remember the moment. I was probably too young. I was home. My parents explained what is happening. And of course, prior leading up to that, there was, even as a child, you sense some stress or some tension building up through the weeks and through the months keeping in mind that their communication was basically reading the Japanese newspaper. They were not daily subscribers to the Oregon Journal or the Oregonian, so it's what hearsay at the Teikoku Hotel or at Mary's Cafe or Inouye's Bath House or in Japantown or the talk at Columbia River Fruit and Vegetable Stand or what's going on that Japan and America, things are coming very tense, and the relationship is really breaking down. So even as a child, you sense something's going on. But I have met people that tell me exactly where they were, the moment they heard the news, the moment they heard about Pearl Harbor, what was happening. No, I cannot. As a small child, I can only say that I learned it from my parents, through my parents at home, and I can also say that they felt extremely stressed out. They didn't know what to do. They didn't know about their future. They didn't know what tomorrow, next week, and next month was going to bring. And probably as the weeks and months went by and the curfew started to become in place, you can see my father having to go to the market early in the morning, could not go to the market early in the morning, and that directly impacted our family and our business. So part of the curfew, and although we didn't, we were not going out late at night anyhow, but the six to eight curfew was certainly in place and certainly you hear about it. And even as a youngster, you hear your parents talking to other parents about it. And when Mr. Yasui would come over or Mr. Matsumoto would come over or Mr. Matsumoto would come over, they'd be talking in very serious tones. And so as a youngster, you would sense that. But I really don't recall the exact date and hour and where I was and what happened.