AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE AFSC ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS: SERIES 400 Personal accounts of individuals who were placed into internment camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and accounts of people who assisted in the relocation of Japanese American students from the camps to colleges and universities around the country. AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE ORAL HISTOY INTERVIEWS SERIES #400 Contents TAKASHI MORIUCHI...................................................................................................................3 SUMIKO KOBAYASHI............................................................................................................... 16 FRED SWAN.................................................................................................................................44 TOSHIYUKI FUKUSHIMA ........................................................................................................69 THOMAS BODINE ....................................................................................................................82 HELEN ELY BRILL .................................................................................................................104 KAY YAMASHITA .................................................................................................................115 LAFAYETTE NODA..................................................................................................................150 NOBU HIBINO ..........................................................................................................................162 GEORGE OYE ...........................................................................................................................184 VIRGINIA HECK ......................................................................................................................215 WILLIAM STEVENSON............................................................................................................229 2 AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE ORAL HISTOY INTERVIEWS SERIES #400 Oral History Interview #401 Narrator: TAKASHI MORIUCHI Interviewer: Geraldine Henry July 8, 1991 Medford Leas, New Jersey H: [Today] is July 8th, 1991. This is Gerry Henry interviewing Takashi Moriuchi at Medford Leas, New Jersey, for the American Friends Service Committee Oral History Project. M: I am Takashi Moriuchi. I was born in Livingston, California. That's in the San Joaquin Valley. My birthday is August 31st, 1919, so that makes me 71. Let's see. What else do you want? H: That's all for now. (tape goes off and on) M: Livingston was a small town of 800 at the time I was there. It was started--I don't know whether Livingston itself was started by the Japanese Americans, but the community, the Yamata colony where the Japanese lived, was started as a Christian colony by the publisher of the Japanese vernacular newspaper in San Francisco. I don't know but maybe there were about a hundred and fifty families there at that time. My parents were essentially fruit tramps, I guess, about the time I was born, and my mother set her foot down and said, "We're going to stay put some place so this kid can go to school in one school." And that's how my father and mother got started in farming. As far as a religious background is concerned, at this time, when father and mother started farming, father was in partnership with a very Christian man, raising sweet potatoes together, and my father was converted to Christianity at that time. I think if it weren't for this man, Mr. Okomoto, I don't know how our family would have fared and whether we would have ever survived as a family. From that point, father and mother had a small farm in Cressy, California. Then a year or two of that as a sharecropper, they moved to Livingston where they farmed, I think again, in partnership with Mr. Gordon Winton. Then eventually, in 1929 I think it was, that father purchased a farm in the name of (Merced Rural Farm), because first generation Japanese were not allowed to own real estate to farm, or to own anything in real estate. I can remember, if you're talking about early recollections, I was a skinny runt of a kid, so father tried to fatten me up by having goats around for goat milk. And I didn't like that so he got a cow. And I remember moving from the one farm to the other farm. It was twilight when we drove the cow to the new farm. It was from this farm that I was eventually evacuated. You want to stop it? (Tape stops and begins again) M: Well, apparently you want to know whether I had any brothers and sisters, and I didn't. I was an only child and one of the troubles with being an only child is when both of your parents want you, you can only go to one and the other one stays mad. (interviewer chuckles) So consequently when I married (Yuri) I told her, I said, "We're either going to have more than one kid or no kids at all." (laughter) So that's a little bit of--well, let's see. 3 AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE ORAL HISTOY INTERVIEWS SERIES #400 We were farming essentially vegetables--tomatoes, eggplants, squash, cantaloupe--at the time we were evacuated. H: Can you say something about the Depression years? How did that affect your family? M: None. Not at all. It didn't affect me at all. (laughter) Everybody was poor. H: (laughter) Anyway. That's true. M: Yes, and I don't think anybody thought to much of it. I think one of the things that probably affected--it didn't affect me particularly, but where there were large families and they couldn't afford to even buy bread to make sandwiches, it was--they thought about taking rice balls to school and they objected to that, that kind of stuff. Actually, in a country setting, I don't think being poor or the Depression bothered us too much. The Okies, when they arrived in California, they had absolutely nothing. So I remember that. The story that's written in Grapes of Wrath is pretty nearly the way it was. And now those same people that came as Okies are the large landholders in California. H: Is that right? M: Some of them. H: That's interesting. How about your schooling when you were a child there. Did you go to the school with mostly Japanese Americans or were you mixed with the Anglos? M: No, we were in a regular public school. It was not segregated. I think as far as the school was concerned we had understanding teachers. I think--I don't remember anything particularly derogatory about it, except that too many of us became valedictorians and as a consequence they started to limit the number of Japanese that could be valedictorians. (interviewer laughs) Truly! H: (laughs) This is really enlightening. M: I was one of them. H: Were you really? H: Yeah. The way it happened with me is that four of us were called into the principal's office and we pulled straws to see who was the valedictorian. I think that the first two would have been Japanese, me and Franklin (Akudo). So Clifford (Gaff) and Bobby Arnold, we were called in. Fortunately it turned out that Frankie pulled one of the long straws and Clifford (Gaff) pulled the other long straw. So it worked out the way that the principal wanted it done anyhow. (laughter) 4 AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE ORAL HISTOY INTERVIEWS SERIES #400 H: O.K. So progressing from the Depression to the next few years, how did your life go? How about your schooling at the University? M: Oh, well, you see my mother, as I said a little earlier, my mother wanted to be sure that I'd go to one school all through, and so I did. Livingston Grammar School and then to high school. And then I went to the University of California. I graduated in 1941, so I graduated before the war started. H: In June of '41? M: Mmm hmm. So I was back with my dad farming when the war started. I can remember leaving home. See at that time we didn't have electricity, and I think the battery in my radio had run out, so I didn't even know that the war had started until on Sunday evening, as I was headed for a young people's church program, I stopped at the drug store and there in headlines it said that the war had started. My recollection at that time was, "Oh my goodness." And I didn't know what to expect. H: What were your parents' reactions, when they first heard the news? M: I don't know. I don't remember. I think, as has been the history of Japanese Americans, they probably took it as, "Well, it's too bad." But I think that it was something that they couldn't do anything about. So they didn't--I'm sure they worried about it but I don't think it was too apparent. (tape stops and starts again) H: At the time of the war, did your parents and your community realize the full extent of the backlash that would occur in the United States against Japanese Americans? M: No, I don't think anyone ever expected anything like the evacuation would happen. We grew up, all the kids we grew up with, and all families that we had grown up with, or my parents had been in contact with--the general feeling was, and it was expressed, that "We know you're all right," but that somebody blew up something up in the northern end of California or something, which never really happened. But the rumors went around. And the reason for the evacuation was military necessity, but by the time we were evacuated the Battle of the Coral Sea had already occurred, so the real military reason for our being evacuated was gone by the time we were evacuated. There was no way that the Japanese Imperial Forces could ever even reach the United States. Many people are aware that a Naval man made a survey of the Japanese American population and he came to the conclusion that there would be no acts of sabotage or espionage by Japanese Americans, as history has proven. Roosevelt didn't want to hear that. It's my thought that he wanted the United States to get into the war anyhow so he welcomed this almost. Actually, you know, it was six months before we were evacuated. And we were told that if we didn't continue farming we were committing sabotage, so we put in our crops and took care of our crops.