Stubborn Twig – Excerpt
At 6:30 P.M. on the Friday after Pearl Harbor, the waiting ended. Two armed agents took Masuo from his home. There were no charges. The family was not told where he was being taken. As the FBI saw it, Masuo was “a wealthy, prominent Japanese merchant and farmer” who “it is report…is strongly Japanese and wants to do something for that government.”
Immediately after his arrest, the rumors personalized and intensified. His white neighbors reasoned that if Masuo was picked up, he must be guilty of something. The award he had received in 1935 from the Japanese Industrial Society honoring his business and agricultural achievements, the award the Hood River News called “a well-earned recognition,” became, in the minds of some, a military award. (The head of the society was the prince of Japan who also held a military title, which may have been the source of the rumor.) Then the rumor mill transformed this imaginary “military award” into a commission in the Japanese navy. The Montgomery Ward console in his living room became a short-wave radio used to transmit coded messages either, as one rumor had it, directly to Japan or, as some were saying, to Japanese submarines in the Pacific. His business success was now thought to have been “funded” by the Japanese government, a carefully orchestrated plot to elevate him to a position of trust and authority in the community. Within days, “Mat” Yasui, the veteran businessman who had lived peacefully in Hood River for thirty-three years, became Masuo Yasui, the Jap spy.