Oral History Videos

John Togashi
Interview Length: 2:05

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
That's how I felt, like I was an American.  But after Pearl Harbor, that kind of changed because I looked like the enemy.  Maybe I felt that way, and the other people didn't feel that way.

I remember the first day that I went back to school.  It was on a Monday.  And there were a group of fellow, I guess fellow athletes, high school athletes.  And they were sitting on a kind of like a pipe barrier they were just sitting down on this pipe.  When I came by they were just kidding me with these, "whee boom, whee boom," making the sounds of the bombs falling on Pearl Harbor.  But they were kind of laughing about it. They were kind of laughing about but it made me feel pretty bad, I'll tell you that.

Interviewer: How did you feel, I mean, what went through your mind when you heard that as you were going to school?

Well, I knew that they were just doing it kiddingly.  And I knew that.  They were smiling while they were doing it.  But what really hurt me was later on when we were all called into the auditorium and our principal made the speech.  And I tell you, I was sitting right in the middle of that assembly hall.  And I felt like all of those eyes were on me because he was saying you know, we are now at war; how we were suppose to act and so on and so forth, a very patriotic speech.  But it made me feel like a little ant in there among all those big cats.  So I felt pretty bad.

Interviewer: And you felt that way for the reason of?

Because I was, I was Japanese, of Japanese descent.