I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I stayed in the Navy until July of 1946.
I was naturalized right before Pearl Harbor. Nine days later, I would have been classified as an enemy alien. I might have been sent to a camp.
I received my parents' permission and went into the Navy on June 3, 1941.
I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
My husband is from Hawaii and his father who was also born in Hawaii was a teenager when Pearl Harbor happened, right before church and he ran up and got on the roof of his grandfather's house and watched the planes go over.
I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.
I spent 34 months on the battleship Alabama, South Dakota-class. I was a gun captain. First we went to Russia for about 11 months with the British convoys. Then we were up in Norway and Scandinavia.
I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.
When I was 17, I was told I had the choice of enlisting in the Navy or going to jail, so I spent the next three years in the Navy.
But in 1941, on December 8th, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, my mother bought a radio and we listened to the war news. We'd not had a radio up to that time. I was born in 1934, so I was seven years of age.