<Begin Segment 12>

TI: So I'm going to now jump to December 7, 1941, Sunday, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And I want to ask you, so where were you and what were you doing when you heard the news?

KO: Uh-huh. Well, Sundays in the Japanese community at that time of the year was always a basketball Sunday. I don't know who scheduled the games, but basketball games from A Class basketball players down to C Class basketball players, and girls, all played on Sunday afternoon at the Peninsula Park. So December 7th was like most other Sundays during that time of the year. We'd leave the house to go to Peninsula Park by bus, get into our basketball uniforms for an afternoon game, play our game and then watch a few of the other games being played. And then I remember walking out to the street to catch the bus back home, and for some reason, we felt there was something different in the air. And then got on the bus and heard the news that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. But the thing about it is, couple years before the war, most Japanese Americans felt that Japan... well, not just Japanese Americans, but there was two or three years before Pearl Harbor, there was always talk about the possibility of war between Japan and America. It was nothing new. And so when...

TI: And where did that sense come from? Why do you think Japanese Americans sort of felt that that was going to happen?

KO: Well, there was... when America -- I don't say took sides with China, but America did take sides with China in this conflict between Japan and China, and was giving aid in the form of military aid to China, and then sanctioning Japan, cutting off their supply of oil from Southeast Asia, and this diplomatic effort between the Japanese diplomats and the U.S. And all of this was covered in the newspaper about the tension between the two countries.

TI: And newspaper meaning the Japanese newspapers, or the daily?

KO: The regular daily newspaper. And in 1937, you know that the U.S. gunboat, the USS Panay was bombed in China on the Yangtze River. That's an act of war kind of thing. And then, of course, much later, and closer to December 7th, General Chennault was, had organized his Flying Tigers and was flying against the Japanese. The question of war was not will it happen, but when will it happen.

TI: So with this going on, earlier you mentioned in elementary school, that ninety-eight percent of the school was Japanese and Chinese. So Japantown and Chinatown were pretty close to each other, and you and other Japanese American kids were growing up with Chinese American kids. Were there ever any conflicts, given that China and Japan were at war? I mean, you're all kind of schoolmates, did that ever present any tension between Chinese and Japanese?

KO: For some it did; not for me. But I wasn't, I wasn't in that part of town, so I was kind of an outsider looking at this situation, when I see some Japanese kids talking about the Chinese kids, and the Chinese kids talking about the Japanese kids. I wasn't... because I was physically separated from that, I didn't have any real harsh feelings about Chinese. In fact, I had, some of the Chinese kids I knew didn't have any harsh feelings about Japanese either. There's a little bit, I don't say different in Seattle, the communities are a little bit larger. But I'm sure that even in Seattle, they were, Japanese kids were outsiders from this, too.

TI: And in Seattle there were incidents where there would be sort of rock throwing between Japanese and Chinese. And they were Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans, they would actually have rock throwing. Did anything like that happen in Portland?

KO: I think there were maybe some horse chestnut throwing. [Laughs]

TI: So not necessarily rocks, but chestnuts. And maybe some words said back and forth, but nothing that serious.

KO: Yeah, I don't even think there were too many words spoken either. It was, this community was a little bit closer together, smaller.

TI: Okay, good. So going back on December 7th, it sounds like when you and your sisters then got the news, and your younger brother, that it wasn't a total surprise. That there was a sense that something might happen between the U.S. and Japan.

KO: Well, the sense that something might happen was certainly there. All this talk about Japanese this and Japanese that, Japanese Americans no different from Japanese, I mean, the whole Japanese race is just, you know. And especially the Hearst papers were just full of it. Which I mentioned had made me so angry, because it wasn't... nothing like that describes me. I'm not Japanese, first of all. Japanese are over there, and I'm a Japanese American.

TI: So in the media, this confusion between the Japanese enemy and Japanese Americans who were in the United States, and Portland, and there seemed to be a confusion between the two, or lumping them together maybe.

KO: Yeah. It was a real insult.

TI: Now, did you, as you saw this, did you get a sense that because of your Japanese ancestry, that that was going to be a problem?

KO: Well, I knew, had a sense that the way the thing was building up -- when I say the thing building up, this group of anti-Japanese in America, especially the Hearst people, something was gonna happen. Because they're calling for it. They're calling for us to be locked up. And so there was no question that something was going to happen, we are gonna be affected.

TI: Now was there something that you could -- I know it was a long time ago, but a particular article or editorial or something that made you worry more than the others? Or was it just more of the general tenor of the press?

KO: It was the general tenor of the press. There were some outspoken, I mean, it's almost like today's voices against President Obama. That group of people who call him a socialist, a Marxist, a Muslim, a foreigner and so on. Same kind of voices heard then about us.

TI: Kind of this extremist, not really true, almost virulent in terms of...

KO: Right.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.