<Begin Segment 18>

DG: So you finish high school and you went to...

BU: Went to UW and then I graduated --

DG: Did you ever think of going anyplace else?

BU: No, I really haven't because, you know, funny, athletics is a funny thing. I used to go see the Husky football team every, every fall.

DG: Even before you got into the U?

BU: Yeah, yeah. And then, and then afterwards I came back. I didn't go to medical school here, I went to New York.

DG: Well, okay. So you went to the U and so you were in pre-med at the U?

BU: I was in pre-med, yeah.

DG: Okay. So was there any problem of getting into school at that time being Japanese or anything?

BU: Yeah, couldn't get into anything. I applied to seventy-two schools.

DG: This is later in medical school?

BU: But still, still we were all concerned about getting in. In fact, they weren't very favorable. We had what we call Pi Mu Kai, which is a pre-med club. I was getting kind of disgusted because all the kids I tutored to go take the exam, what they call pre-med exam, they all passed, and they all went to med school, but I never did. There weren't that many, there weren't that many Niseis taking pre-med. Very few of them got into med school, so it isn't just me. And then, then at the end of the, beginning of the war, the Quaker people helped us, these Japanese. They picked out ten, ten students that were doing pretty good and said, "Will you go to Moscow, Idaho, if you, if you are admitted there?" And said, they told, they gave us a big pitch about, "Camp isn't going to do you any good. It's going to be a waste of time so you better do something so we'll do it for you if you'll go." So I said okay, we'll go. So ten of us did. But when you got to Idaho, it was just the wrong time because they had the Bataan death march in Philippine Island and a lot of the, just the fact that the National Guard, Idaho National Guard, was there and a lot of them died. So the governor there said, "We can't possibly let these saboteurs come to our public state-backed university," so they kicked us out. And then the Quakers again took ten of us and said, the women, we're going to put them in jail for as long as we need it so they put them in jail. So the rest of us boys, we got shipped out to Quaker families and all that, and we had to do a little work and whatnot until about ten or twelve days later on, they got us into Pullman.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.