Norman Mineta Interview (page: 3 / 9) Former U.S. Secretary of Transportation	Print Interview

In the days after Pearl Harbor, how did you and your family find out that you were going to be taken from your homes and sent to an internment camp?

Norman Mineta: We had just returned from church. It was just after 12:00 noon, and the phone was ringing off the hook. My dad was a leader in the Japanese American community. People were wondering, "What's going to be the impact of this attack on Pearl Harbor?" People were starting to come over to the house, as well.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Next-door to our home was a home where the executive director of the Japanese Association of Santa Clara County lived. Now this was just a social organization, but about 1:30, their daughter Joyce came running in our back door. We had a hedge between our home, and we cut out a little hedge so that Irving or Joyce or I could go back and forth through that hedge to each other's homes. Joyce came running in about 1:30 saying, "The police are taking papa away! The police are taking papa away!" So my dad went running out of the house, next-door, but by that time the FBI had already taken Mr. Hirano away, and it was several months before they knew what had happened to Mr. Hirano. Well, my dad was a good friend of the city manager, chief of police, county sheriff, head of the FBI, so he would call them up and find out what's going on, and they said that, "We're picking up leaders in the Japanese American community, people who we suspect if -- in case the Japanese invaded the West Coast -- might have some proclivity to work with the invading troops." So in any event, a number of Japanese Americans, or Buddhist priests and others, were picked up on the 7th of December.

My dad's insurance office was in the front. When he designed the house, he built an office in the front of the house. So I would sit in the hallway, just outside the door into the office, listening to friends coming over or him talking on the phone about what was going on. Of course, that had a tremendous impact on me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. President Roosevelt then signed Executive Order 9066 on the 17th of February 1942, delegating to the Commanding General of the Western Military Command the power to evacuate and intern Japanese Americans. So what they did was to put up these big, big placards on the sides of buildings, the utility poles, and it said, "Attention: All those of Japanese ancestry, alien and non-alien." So already psychological warfare was being worked on us. We weren't even being considered citizens of the United States. We were "non-aliens" of the United States of America. I remember in March of '42, I saw my brother crying, and I was wondering what he was crying about. Well, he had a 1A Selective Service draft card: "Ready, fit, and able to serve." All of a sudden he got one day a 4C. Well, everyone knows what a 4F is, well his was 4C. What the Selective Service System had done was to send out new draft cards to all Japanese American males saying, "4C: Enemy Alien." So here was a kid who was born and raised in San José, he was a sophomore at San José State, and all of a sudden he is looking at his card with 4C on it.

So there was a great deal of consternation in the Japanese American community from Washington to California. After the evacuation orders came out, they said that they would only evacuate the people from the coastline to maybe 75 miles inland, that was Zone 1. So a lot of people moved from Zone 1 into Zone 2, but by about April of '42, they had declared everything to the Nevada border as Zone 1, so everyone in California, Oregon, and Washington got swept up in the evacuation order. They didn't include some of the far reaches of the east side of Washington and Oregon, but all of California was designated as Zone 1.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. By April we had to get our typhoid shots, all the viruses -- chickenpox, smallpox -- all of those shots we had to get, and people had to sell everything, because they couldn't take but just what they could carry. I remember my dad had just purchased a 1941 Packard in November of '40, and he, I believe, paid about $1,100 for the car, and he sold it in March for about $400, just to get rid of the car. A lot of people... there were stories of people who would come along and say, "Well, that refrigerator, Mr. Suzuki, you can't take with you. I'll buy it for $5.00," or $10.00, whatever, and I remember there was a story about a woman who had her things for sale. Someone came to buy her good china, and they said, "Well, we'll pay you $5.00," so she took them and just threw them to the floor and said, "I am not going to sell them for five and you are not going to get it," and had just, in anger, broken all of her dishes. There were many, many examples of that.

When it came to real property, we were very fortunate in Santa Clara County.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Back in 1892, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act, and then in 1924, the Oriental Exclusion Act, which said that no Asians -- or, as they were called, "Orientals" then, and I always say, "Orientals are rugs and Asians are people," but in those days, they said that "Orientals" could not become U.S. citizens, and California, Washington, and Oregon had a law saying, "If you can't become a U.S. citizen, then you can't own land," known as the Alien Land Law.

When my dad bought this land in 1928, to build a home, we had an attorney in San José by the name of J.B. Peckham. Mr. Peckham would put the land in his name, and when the oldest child became 21, he would then change the ownership to that land. So if you ever took a look at the property rolls in Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, San Benito, Santa Cruz County, Monterey County, you would see "J.B. Peckham, J.B. Peckham, J.B. Peckham," and you would go, "Wow, this guy is really rich, look at all the land he has owned!" He kept the land in his name for the Chinese, Filipino and Japanese people who couldn't become U.S. citizens. As their oldest children, natural-born citizens of the United States, turned 21, he would transfer the property to their name.

Fortunately, many of our properties were not escheated by the government in 1942, just because of what Mr. Peckham had done in the '20s and '30s. So when we got our evacuation orders, we rented our home to a professor at San José State, Dr. Lucy Lawson in the Speech and Drama Department. She and her mother lived in the home for the duration of World War II, and our properties were saved.

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