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LT: Let's talk about your responsibilities at home, and then we'll talk about Reed. What special roles did this place on you as the eldest son at home with your mother who didn't speak English and your two younger siblings and your father gone?

GT: Well, we did one thing: we contacted this attorney, family attorney. He'd been worried about our family, and he was glad to come. And he asked me and my mother to come down to his office to discuss things. And he gave us a pretty good rundown on our rights and so forth. He says he's convinced that Dad was not an "enemy alien." As a matter of fact, the sad part was that he was actually born in Hawaii, so he was, should have been, his birth should have been recorded at that time and be declared a natural-born American citizen. But his parents obviously had no intention of spending the rest of their life being a plantation laborer, so they never bothered to register his birth there. And so my dad discovered that he was not an American citizen at that time for the first time.

LT: You were not able to visit your father until at least a week later, and that was at the downtown Portland jail.

GT: Yeah.

LT: What do you remember about that, and what did your father say?

GT: Well, he didn't have much to say, except he, of course, asked how we're doing, and were we being harassed, and we told him, no, but we knew what the rules were, that we couldn't be out after five o'clock, out in the street. And as a student, I had to be home by five, which made it difficult because I faced the problem all pre-med students have in college. We have lectures in the morning, then we have labs all afternoon, and then we have to study at night. And when I went to Haverford, they had a different role for me to play. They thought I'd be a good source of information within the student group to tell them what it was like to be an Asian in the three Western states, which I was able to do, but I did not study with them or be assigned dorm rooms reserved for pre-med students. So I didn't get that advantage of the automatic competitiveness to study harder. Because they put me in with history majors, sociology majors, and I was supposed to tell her what was bad about, what was difficult about an Asian, especially a Japanese at the time, living in the coastal states.

LT: Coming back to Reed, you mentioned that after Pearl Harbor was bombed, the atmosphere with your peers at Reed College changed.

GT: It did for me. There were, I think there were five or six other Niseis there, had established a good relationship with their classmates. When I got there, and I was a commuter, so I only go there to attend classes and come home when I could. And so I had not established any personal relationship with my classmates, and they were hit with the propaganda that was being put in the newspapers and the radio programs. So I never got a chance to really establish any kind of a positive relationship with my classmates in Reed. So that it wasn't fun for me to be at Reed either, because there was hardly anyone who would bother talking to me, even my classmates, because they were, their mind had been warped by all the propaganda that was appearing in the newspapers and so forth. So having missed a lot of classes, and not being able to stay, in January, I made an appointment to speak to the dean, and I was going to ask permission to withdraw from Reed, because I could never get any kind of grades that would permit me to be accepted to any medical school. And rather than have that over my head, I would rather just drop out of school and I'll be back after the war is over. And he said that was a good thought, because, "We've been worried about you, and we thought you should drop out of school. And what you're suggesting to us is exactly what we thought you should do, where you will not have a bunch of bad grades to have to explain away four or five years later if you still wanted to go to medical school while your grades were not good, that that would not reflect your intentions."

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2014 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.