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LT: Gus, on December 7, 1941, you were a freshman at Reed College in Portland. You attended classes during the day and then you commuted home. On Sunday, December 7th, your father was also a prominent physician in Portland, and he had practiced for twenty years in Old Town, Portland. Your family received a phone call from your father. Can you tell us what he said and what happened afterward?

GT: Well, when we kids woke up that Sunday, Dad was already out of the house making house calls and hospital calls and other things that related to his work. That was his routine Sunday; he never took Sundays off. But he called about, I would guess, close to noontime to tell Mom that there's talk around the hospital that there's, on the radio station, that Japan has bombed Pearl Harbor, and how duplicitous Japan was in doing this. Well, when I heard about it, I felt the same way. Because I don't know if you -- you're too young to remember what was happening at that time -- Cordell Hull was our Secretary of State, and he was meeting almost daily with the Japanese ambassador who was stationed in Washington. And they were meeting almost daily trying to figure out some way to find a peaceful solution to this antagonism that our country and Japan was engaged in. And it looked like there was some hope, because all of a sudden Japan started acting very conciliatory, and they sent another diplomat to help the ambassador work on the issues that kept the two countries apart, and everybody felt good about that. But then when Dad was making his rounds, he says the news is that the Japanese navy has bombed the heck out of Pearl Harbor, they've sunk a lot of our, destroyed our naval ships and so forth. And I thought, well, that's a heck of a deal to lead us into thinking that they were getting serious about a peaceful resolution to our relationship, and then to literally destroy our sea power overnight. And I was just as angry about it as anyone when this word came out.

LT: What happened next at your home?

GT: At my home? Well, my mother was in tears, she didn't know what she was going to do. And the FBI came to the house about two-thirty or three o'clock in the afternoon wanting to see Dad. And he said he was making rounds and seeing patients, but he said he'd be home for dinner by five o'clock. And so they said, "Is he usually pretty regular?" We can count on, when he says five o'clock, he'll be coming home at five. And they said goodbye and left. Well, at five o'clock, this time, instead of two FBI people -- we didn't know who they were, they never identified them the first time, they were well-dressed in suits and so forth -- and this time they came, and there were three of them, and they showed their FBI badge and they said, "Your dad isn't home at five o'clock." I said, "Well, he usually is, we don't know why." Well, what we didn't know was there was another team of FBI people who were waiting until Dad came home, he was putting his car away in the garage, and before he could let us know he was home, they picked him up and took him away.

LT: And this was at what time?

GT: This was about five o'clock. He had made his rounds and he was through for the night, and we were waiting for him to have dinner together, but we never saw him after that, and they wouldn't tell us where he went. That was quite a shock. And my mother was in tears because without him, she wouldn't know how to get along.

LT: What happened at your home then?

GT: What's that?

LT: What happened at your home then?

GT: Well, after five o'clock, they started... they were going to go through your house and find weapons and whatever they suspected people of having. And so first thing they asked me was, "Where are your weapons?" Well, I remember that Dad had a revolver and a box of ammunition stored away in the bottom drawer of his dresser, and we were told never to play with them or anything, but we all knew where it was. We wanted to be cooperative; I brought the... and he says, "Where's the rest?" I said, "What do you mean?" "Where are the rest of your weapons? We know you've got tons of weapons hidden here." And I said, "If there is, I don't know about it." Right away they said, "We'll see." So at that point they said, "We're going to go through your house." And oh, about half hour later, one of the FBI agents came out, and he had an ancient samurai sword, and he shoved it in my face. He said, "You said there were no more weapons in the house." I said, "That's an old three hundred year old, I understand, a three hundred year old artifact of history. And a matter of fact, that's all we regard that. Matter of fact, Dad used to have it hung over the fireplace as an ornament." That's all we regarded it. And the only reason it was in the closet was Dad took it down because he wanted to put it in something that would be more appropriate for the coming Christmas holiday, and that's why it was put away. It wasn't hidden. And says, "Well, we'll see later." And so, but when he saw that samurai sword, he said, "You are a liar. With your explanation of why it was in the closet, we'll take it at your word for now. But be prepared to be taken away with your father when he leaves." And I just, oh my gosh, I was scared enough to wet my pants at this point. But they went through the house and they picked up all sorts of little things. And if you have ever talked to some of the older Issei ladies whose husbands were taken away that night, and for about a month beyond, they were treated very harshly. These people were relatively kind hearted, the way they treated me by comparison. They were pushing ladies apart, and they said the FBI went through the house, they pulled the drawers out of the dressers and dump it out on the floor, kicked the contents around with their feet, and anything that they thought was suspicious, they would pull out and hold as evidence to justify more restrictive treatment of that family. And it was pretty rough at the time.

LT: What items did they take from your home in addition to the ornamental sword and the gun?

GT: Well, they took everything, any photograph that had Asians and Orientals in the photograph. They didn't ask what they were, they just picked them all up, they said they're going to study them later. Anything written, well, we'd written letters back home to her family in Japanese, they would respond, so she had a stack of letters from Japan, they took all those. And she had Japanese newspapers, one was printed in Portland. And she had magazines printed in Japan, they took all those away.

LT: How long did the three FBI agents stay at your house?

GT: Probably two hours. And they... when we heard how, a month later, the reverend was talking more freely about what happened, we were treated very courteously by these people. Because they wrote out a receipt for everything that they took and signed, and believe it or not, took two years after the war ended, but a huge package came. And in the meantime, Dad had moved to Ontario. All this occurred in Portland, but they must have been following him all those years after he was released from imprisonment, he was held and imprisoned in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it was an abandoned... one of those...

LT: It was a detention center? Justice detention center.

GT: And because he was a doctor and the only practicing doctor there, they designated him the camp physician, and it was his duty to give health care to all the other prisoners, and then on occasion take care of, say, one of the employees, guards, cut his hand or something like that, he'd take care of it.

LT: We'll talk about that a little bit later. I want to ask you a few more questions about what occurred, because your mother didn't speak English, you were the eldest of three, you had graduated from high school, and so you were the eldest son, you really took on more roles for your family. How did... without your father at home, with him gone, what roles, what responsibilities, what worries did that give you?

GT: Well, it gave me quite a bit, because I managed not to go to Haverford, I mean, go to Reed College regularly. They had a five-mile limit, and from where I lived to the Reed College campus was a little bit more than five miles.

LT: And you were a freshman at Reed.

GT: Yeah, I was a freshman there. And I had to take a trolley to come to the Thirty-third Street, and then take the cross town bus all the way to the Reed College campus.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.