<Begin Segment 29>

SF: Over that long time period, did you ever bump into Japanese Americans, cover a Japanese American story or something about the Japanese American community, anything of that sort?

JF: No, I don't recall. I don't recall what I did. No. A fellow who lived across the street from us, a fellow by the name of Bob Dietch, was a, I don't know how he ever got the job, but he was the secretary of, of a Japanese American veterans organization. And I was writing a column at the time, and this was fairly recent, last twenty-five years or so. And he said, "Why don't you come to one of the meetings with me and meet some of these people?" So I went down, somewhere down in this area here, and I met a lot of these people. A lot of them were 442nd veterans. And I was pretty impressed. And I wrote, I wrote about them. And then I don't how many, I don't know whether I ever went back to another meeting or not because Bob got pretty sick at that time and eventually died of cancer. But that was one of my first contacts.

JB: Joe, when did you first learn about the 442nd?

JF: I don't really remember. I think, I think when I was at, in the, in Fort Dix, I think it was Fort Dix, where they left, they, where we landed when we came home from overseas, they said, "All you people who live west of the Mississippi are lucky. You're all going to be flown home." Turns out we weren't lucky at all because the weather was so inclement that they, day after day flights were scrapped, just cancelled. And in fact, I tried like heck to be discharged right there in Baltimore just so I could go home, and then get out to Seattle on my own hook. Because it just took forever. And one, one of the reasons that they cancelled people flying from New York to Seattle was that a planeload of Nisei, 442nd people, had crashed in the mountains somewhere. I'm not quite sure where. So they cancelled all of those flights. So when we did get on a flight, we went down through Texas, and I was finally discharged in California, then had to come up here by train and by bus. I was a basket case by the time I got home. But that's, I think that's probably one of the first times I really heard about the 442nd was when that, when that plane went down.

SF: How did finding out about the 442 affect your attitudes about Japanese or Japanese Americans?

JF: Well, my attitude had softened quite a bit before then in talking to my wife about the, the friends that she had who were Japanese, and I got a little background about what these people did here and what kind of people they were, and actually not different than anybody else, and not at all the absolutely horrible people I thought they were. So that was a process of time and getting to know more about what I was talking about.

And I mentioned that we were in Hawaii, and this cab driver turned out to be a veteran of the 442nd, and he mentioned the numbers, and I, it didn't click with me at all. And he said -- he wasn't very kind, in fact, he was pretty, pretty beat out of shape about the fact that I didn't know what the 442 numbers meant. He says, "What the hell's wrong with you? Don't you know anything about history?" And I said, "Well, probably not enough." And he says, "Well, the 442nd was the most decorated outfit in the army," and so forth. And he gave me a thumbnail lecture. But I mean, he was so, so adamant and so worked up about the thing, that this must have been some outfit. But I'll never forget that. He was, he didn't know who I was or my background at all, but he was sure as hell telling me about his background. So I kind of appreciated that.

SF: What did your wife say about her Japanese American friends, and did you make friends with them because she knew them or anything like that?

JF: Well, they were, they were classmates of hers. She had, she had been, she went to Leschi School for a while. She went, she had a rather mobile life as a young, as a younger child. And her mother got divorced, and so forth, and so she was, had moved around quite a bit. But she, she got to be pretty friendly with some of the, some of the people. Actually, tomorrow the Golden, Garfield Golden Grads are having a lunch, and she and I are going to go to that, and I'll meet again some of the many Japanese Americans who were in the class and who still, still come back to the meetings, which is kind of interesting. But she, she just knew them as fellow students at Garfield, and what they did and what they didn't do, and they, the background didn't, didn't seem to play any, any part. It was just, I mean, any more than someone, they, she was, if they were Irish or whether they were Jewish or Greeks or whatever the heck, it didn't make any difference. They were just classmates and friends.

SF: In the old days, when you just got back, and she mentioned that these folks were her friends because she had gone to school with them and so forth, did you ever get into a little discussion about, about the Japanese or anything like that, because your attitudes were different at that time?

JF: I don't think so, (Steve). I don't, I don't recall anything like that, although given the situation, you'd think that that would have happened, but I'm, I'm not, I think in all probability my stand had softened considerably by that time, so I'm sure I was ready to hear more about these people that I didn't know anything at all about.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.