Yasuo Yamashita: My name is Yasuo Yamashita. I was born on November 22, 1919, by midwife, and my home was 1705 Walnut Street. I lived in Alameda all my life, and I went to Everett grammar school, Haight, Porter, and Alameda High School. I graduated in 1938 of January. We always lived close to McKinley Park, so that's where my hangout was.

When I left Alameda, we were evacuated to different parts of California. My family decided to go to the free zone. If you lived east of Highway 99, they said they won't put you in camp, so we went to Sanger, California, which was east of Highway 99. Then they came out with a new law saying that you had to be out of California. Well, we decided at that time then that we will not move anymore and we will have the army forcefully remove us.

The army took us to Gila Indian reservation. There were two camps there, Butte Camp and Canal Camp. I was in Canal Camp, I still remember the barrack number, 24-13-A, that was my home. This friend of mine, his name is Tom Yamagami, we grew up together in Alameda. He was in Butte Camp. One day he came over to me and says, "Let's get out of camp." And I says, "Where do you want to go?" He says, "I don't know, where shall we go?" And I said, "Well, we might as well go start at New York, then we can work our way back if we want to." If we don't get any employment, we can be closer. We stayed in New York for a couple of months, then the draft board in New York called us for our physical examination. The recruiting officer there said, "You're going to be drafted into the U.S. Army," and he was a kind fellow, and he said, "You know," he says, "if I were you," he said, "I'd move back to Gila River, then they'll draft you, but you will be drafted about two or three months later." So I packed up my things again and went back to camp.

And from there, at camp, I got drafted into the U.S. Army. I was inducted at Fort Douglas, Utah, I took my basic training with the 442 in Mississippi. The army ordered me to Camp Savage, Minnesota, that's where they had the Japanese military intelligence, MIS. I graduated from the Japanese school there, then they were about to ship me off to the South Pacific on the train. I heard the news that the war was over, so I at least knew that we would not go into any combat zone.

After I was at Fort Snelling for a month, they formed a group of 125 MIS graduates, I was included in that group. We shipped out 125 of us, all Japanese Americans, and we went and landed in Yokohama in October of 1945. We lined up on the war, 125 of us Nisei soldiers. There were many Japanese civilian people, they wanted to know what was going on. When they saw 125 Japanese American soldiers lined up, they figured we were Japanese citizens that was captured during the war, we were prisoners of the war, and we were being returned to Japan. One elderly lady finally got up the courage to come up and ask me, "What South Pacific island are you coming from?" I had to think. Then I says, I told this elderly lady that we were not Japanese prisoners of war returning to Japan, we were Nisei, Japanese American soldiers from the United States that came to occupy Japan.

From there, we went to Tokyo, and we got attached to a group that was called ATIS, that was the Allied Translator Interpretive Services. About a month later, we found out that we were going to be divided into five groups who were being transferred to either Seoul, Korea, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, and Fukuoka. Our group went to Osaka at the beginning of November, and there we were, assigned to the Civil Censorship Detachment. That was a censorship group that was censoring all the letter mail, telegrams, telephones, newspapers, and even theater productions, like even kabuki and things like that. And then I was assigned to the postal censorship. We were censoring the Japanese civilians' mail. My CO was a lieutenant instructing Japanese citizen employees what sort of information we were looking for. He was going to be reassigned, and I was to take over. So I took over as the instructor teaching these Japanese employees censorship. My commanding officer told me, "If you would like to stay here, we will give you a War Department civilian civil service status. You could work as a civilian doing the same job you're doing. That was May in '46. I accepted that position, and I stayed there for two years. I got married in Japan also, then I came back to Alameda to join my brother and my parents. I worked for the postal services and retired in 1977. I guess I'm living in their retirement, and I am ninety-one years old now, still going strong, I hope.