George Fukayama: My name is George Fukayama and I was born in Los Angeles, California back in February 21, 1926. And when the war broke out, I was going to high school and I would be sixteen years old. When the atomic bomb was dropped, I was in Texas taking my basic training. I was trying to go to Europe as a replacement for the 442 Regimental Combat Team. But then, two days before, since the war was coming to an end, they rescinded my orders and sent me to Fort Snelling for the Japanese language school. The school moved to the Presidio of Monterey, and so I graduated from the Presidio in the first graduation class. And from there, I was sent to Japan for the occupation. I was assigned to ATIS, the Allied Translator Interpreter Section, General Headquarters in Tokyo, and I was assigned to the interpreters pool. I had various duties, I was the interpreter for the investigation of Class B war criminals for the Economic Section of General Headquarters at that time. I was sent on a temporary duty to Hokkaido, where they had coal mines up there, and we had to investigate the working conditions of the minors because they were mostly Korean prisoners of war. At that time, you could not send letters or packages to Japan because it was brought after the war had ended. My then-girlfriend was living in Alameda, Mary Hasegawa's younger sister, Akko. And her mother wrote a letter to Mary, and I said, "Once I get to Japan, I'll send the letter through the Japanese post." But then once I got to Tokyo, I thought, well, Fukushima is only about a couple hundred miles away from here, maybe I could go visit them. And I sent a telegram saying who I am, and, "I would like to go visit you because I have a letter for Mary," and that's why I went to Fukushima.

What brought me to Alameda was, after the war, and serving time in the army, my wife -- still my girlfriend at that time -- we just gravitated together and we finally got married. After we got married, we wanted to buy a house in Alameda, but a lot of the real estate companies would not show us homes outside of the boundaries for the Japanese. And I was told straight off the bat, says, "Oh, we don't sell homes to Japs in that neighborhood." It was difficult. A lot of the evacuees were returning. The church in Alameda had a hall, and the hall was the quarters for a lot of the returning Japanese because they couldn't return to their own home. A lot of the tenants were living in their homes would not move out. During the war, he got his, rented the house out. One of the real estate companies took care of the property, but it turned out that they kept a lot of the rent for themselves, and quite a few of the furniture was missing. Some of the other furniture, tenants said that it was theirs. It was covered with upholstery covers, and when she looked underneath there, that was their chair that they were trying to sell back to the Igakis. Also, they had a whole set of Japanese dolls, they call it ohinasama, that was gone and whoever took those sold those. If we had those dolls now, it would be quite precious and quite valuable.

Thinking back of the prewar days and comparing it with the post-World War II days, I believe that we as Japanese Americans had made huge progress as far as being a citizen of the United States where we were once declared "enemy aliens" and put into concentration camps during the war. A lot of the boys in camp volunteered for this all-Japanese unit, and as you may know, the 442/100th Battalion Regimental Combat Team at that time was... oh, at the end of the war was the most decorated unit in the history of the United States Army. So because of them, some of us who served in the Military Intelligence section, I think because of our, what we had done, we were recognized, I guess, as good American citizens.