quote:
Would be interesting to somehow find out what happened to those Japanese guys during the war. Were they interned like their west coast kin or perhaps pressed into service as interpreters.
If you read the link on Taro, it says
quote:
But after Pearl Harbor 1941, U.S. authorities rounded up & questioned all Mitsui employees at Ellis Island, NY. He was photographed, finger-printed and required to carry an I.D. at all times; the young couple returned to Texas.
He went back to rice farming during the war. It is interesting that they did not use him in the war effort.
Ando is also interesting. Thanks to Google, I was able to find
This Linkquote:
Almost sixty years ago my mother stopped by to visit her stepfather at his office in Dallas. But on this day in 1941, he was not at his desk. Kiyo Ando, a graduate of Texas A & M, an electrical engineer who had lived in the U.S. all but six months of his life had been detained, taken into custody by the FBI because of his Japanese heritage.
History has not been kind to the executive order that called for the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. The internment camps created great hardships and terrible indignities for those held there and constituted a flagrant breach of our Constitution. The federal government has since apologized to the survivors and offered twenty thousand dollars to each of them in reparations. My grandfather, who became a U.S. citizen in 1955, did not live to collect.
Although Mr. Ando has apparently passed on, I found
other links listing a Kiyo Ando, age 107, living in Emory, Texas. One would imagine that the link is wrong, though if it were correct, it would be amazing to find the guy.
